USC students win national award in phone app contest
First they won best app idea in Pennsylvania, then best in the 14-state region, and now the six-student Upper St. Clair team is one of eight national winners in Verizon’s National App Challenge. The team’s idea, called “A Look Inside,” was a pitch to design a phone application that would allow users to virtually deconstruct everyday objects and technology. The idea beat out more than a thousand other schools’ entries
In addition to $20,000 in grant monies awarded to the school, it was announced Feb. 3 each student would receive a Samsung tablet. And now the team gets to work with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab to develop their concept into a working application.
“We wanted to provide a solution – for there to be a way to learn about technology that is right in front of you, but you can’t really learn about. People used to take things apart. This is how today’s children can do it cheaply and safely,” said 16-year-old Vidhi Shah.
“I had always read in books people like Bill Gates and other innovators; they said when they were children, they took things apart. Today, it’s so difficult to do that,” said 16-year-old Christina Park.
For research, the team tinkered with other applications’ features, and found their app could be a hybrid of two they found useful.
“One app was ‘Disassembly 3D’, an app that allows you to smash objects to pieces … the other was ‘My Incredible Body,’ a human anatomy program that showed cutaways and information on the body,” said Michael Nastac, 17, “and we found the first app wasn’t very educational, but fun and interactive and gave great feedback. And the body app was very educational, but lacked accessible and enjoyable interactive features.”
“For Verizon to host this, and challenge students to come up with ideas for apps even as developers produce thousands of apps each year – it shows the ability to express human ingenuity is still valued. And that it’s valuable to consumers and users of technology,” said 16-year-old Akshay Prasadan.
Other team members are Guarav Bhushan and Nymisha Rameswarapu. The students will attend a sponsored trip to the National Technology Student Association Conference this summer in Dallas.