“Not only do these young ladies have big brains, but they’ve also got big hearts.”
When the Commander in Chief himself sings your praises, that’s when you know you’ve done something great.
So who were the recipients of President Obama’s compliment?
That would be a group of girls from Resaca Middle School (RMS) in Los Fresnos, Texas that have designed an app called Hello Navi to help guide the blind and visually impaired in their surroundings.
Once in operation, Hello Navi will involve the use of a compass, scanner, VoiceOver, optical braille readers and Google navigation to help visually-imparied students traverse the world.
The app was one of eight winners in Verizon’s Innovative App Challenge, earning RMS a $20,000 grant. The bonus prize? Meeting the President during the White House Science Fair on May 27th. Not too shabby for a group of sixth and seventh graders.
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According to a press release, the winning teams (four middle schools, four high schools) were selected from a pool of approximately 1,300 teams across the country that entered the contest.
The young inventors — Jacquelyne Garcia Torres, Caitlin Gonzales, Janessa Leija, Cassandra Baquero, Grecia Cano and Kayleen Gonzalez — were inspired by a friend, Andres Salas, a sixth-grader who is visually impaired.
The girls, with help from Verizon employees and MIT App Inventor Training Corps, will learn to code and focus on developing their app concept into an actual app, the press release states.
Good News Network reports that it will soon be available for all visually impaired students to download — for free.
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