Jan 9, 2015 By David Singer 5 min read

A six-student team from Upper St. Clair High School’s Gifted program has won first place in Pennsylvania and now the first in the Midwestern region in Verizon’s National App Challenge, beating out 1,099 other app concepts. The team’s pitch of dissecting 3D models of everyday objects and technology virtually on a screen beat out hundreds of schools in the 14-state region that stretches to Oklahama. The team received a $5,000 grant and each member was awarded a Samsung tablet. They move on to the national competiton with $15,000 at stake. The national winners will be announced Feb. 3.

The USC team’s idea for an application is called “A Look Inside,” and would offer users the ability to virtually tear-apart and learn about the inside goings-on of machinery like watches, TVs, or, the very phone they’re viewing it on.

“A phone, you can’t break it down … so there’s a need – and we want 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 Vidhi Shah, 16.

“Our first idea for it was to capture images of objects around you with the phone’s camera, then the app would trawl a database to find that and present you with a virtual cut-away of the object,” said Michael Nastac, 17, “but we realized that would be difficult even for professional programmers.”

The compromise was to pitch an app with a pre-made database of commonly-used objects, then have a feedback feature that allows users to vote on new items that would be scanned into the educational database. The app would have “speech bubbles” that pop-up to identify key parts and describe their functions. Then, a short quiz would be given after a user finishes dissecting the object.

“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. 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,” said Nastac.

The team decided on an educational application among the two other categories of healthcare and sustainability.

“We decided on an educational application pitch because it can be used in these other vocations to educate about how to make things more efficiently or inspire people how to build better products in those categories,” said Gaurav Bhushan, 16, “and we were torn between our separate interests in physics and biology, so this was a sort of non-partisan solution that hit all the areas we wanted to work on.”

The team produced a short video summarizing their idea, which highlighted the team’s efforts on designing the learning program for children in elementary and middle school. Not discussed in the video obviously enough, were the team’s ideas that were left on the cutting room floor.

“We pitched amongst ourselves a financial life simulator, so kids could about money and time management,” said 16-year-old Akshay Prasadan.

“Another idea was a chat application for dealing with depression or addiction,” said Shah.

“And one was a competitive sustainability app that uses networking akin to the game ‘Words with Friends.’ It would’ve had users posting about short shower times, stuff they recycled – tapping into those narcissistic and competitive sides of human nature for a combined good,” said Bhushan.

But the team’s current pitch – the one that netted them the top spot in Pennsylvania – is one members said is pared back to be pragmatic and ultimately useful to those who may see it in production one day. The team – the first one from USC to compete in the three-year-old competition – said being able to compete on a national stage shows there’s still the need for young application developers.

“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 Prasadan.

“I think we have a pretty good chance of winning. A lot of our competitors’ ideas had to do with scheduling and coordinating with clubs. We feel our idea emphasizes learning and it seems to be an outlier in terms of originality,” Park said.