Winning teams pose with their certificates in the HUB Ballroom on the Fairfax Campus of George Mason University.
More than 100 high school students from Washington, DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia worked with local mentors at George Mason University during the week of August 10 to learn how to build their very first apps. This hands on event, PilotDC 2015, was sponsored by Pilot an organization that coordinates events for high school students all across the country. This session was supported by Microsoft, George Mason University, and MoDev, supported and organized the session that took place on Mason's Fairfax Campus.
During this hands-on event participants formed teams, brainstormed ideas, worked together and brought one of those ideas to life with technology. After that, they demonstrated and pitched the apps they created for awards and prizes. At the end of the two-day event more than 20 teams presented their apps to an audience of 200 parents and guests.
"Hosting events, like Pilot DC gives students who are interested in learning to code an opportunity to work with experts and create something of their very own," said Kamaljeet Sanghera," Associate Professor, in the Volgenau School of Engineering's Department of Information Sciences Technology. "When we work with all levels of experience, we show these students that building their own apps is fun and exciting."
The winning teams and their categories were:
• Heart (Most Useful), a Fitbit-based stress tracking app that reports what locations tend to raise your heart rate
• Sing It Off! (Most Creative), an alarm clock that plays a song, and the user must sing the correct lyrics to turn it off
• EyeMove (Most Innovative), a webcam eye tracker that moves the users cursor by tracking eye movement that can be used by people with disabilities to control their computers
Details about the projects (and more info about the winning ones, including team members) can be found here.