On Tuesday, February 3, six Upper St. Clair High School students were recognized for winning the Verizon Innovative App Challenge. This challenge was a competition where teams designed an app relating to any one of these three categories: sustainability, healthcare, or education.

These students participate in the gifted program at Upper St. Clair High School. Specifically, the students are a part of STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The participants include juniors Gaurav Bhushan, Akshay Prasadan, Michael Nastac, Christina Park, Vidhi Shah, and Nymisha Rameswarapu.

The app they designed this year is called “A Look Inside.” Akshay Prasadan describes the purpose of their app: “It’s meant to look at the layers of technology, such as pencils, pens, watches, clocks, all sorts of things, even televisions. And we want to be able to teach kids how the inner parts of it work, as well as explain how these things are put together.”

To design this complex app, the students first had to start with the basics and brainstorm. Junior participant Nymisha Rameswarapu explained the beginnings of the process: “So we started off with making a video. We had whiteboards and we started designing like that as well. And after that we had a powerpoint presentation to present to the rest of the team.”

In January, the students learned that they had won Best in State and Best in Region for their app. After receiving these honors, the students participated in a live web chat with judges and scientists throughout the country.

These students, however, have not achieved everything without guidance. Mrs. Pat Palazzolo, the Gifted Education Coordinator at the high school, has been a constant supporter of the group and will further work with all of them in their continuing endeavors.

Palazzolo shares their future plans: “Well, now they turned that dream into reality. So we will be working with MIT to learn how to actually create the app using a program called MIT App Inventor. And from my understanding an MIT person will actually come to the school to do a site visit and work with the students and then further training will be online.”

As a reward for their hard work and a way to further expand their knowledge, the students received an all-expenses-paid trip to Dallas, Texas, for the National Technology Student Association Conference. To top it all off, Upper St. Clair School District received $20,000 from the Verizon Foundation to promote its STEM program.