NC high school students design apps to solve real-world problems

NC high school students developed apps that can detect melanoma, help people on the autism spectrum, and connect young people with chances to volunteer and learn to drive.

Gov. Roy Cooper recently announced the winners of the Fifth Annual Ready, Set, App! Competition.

This event saw eight teams of high school students from North Carolina pitch their original app designs to a panel of professionals from the tech industry and a live audience. The competition provided the students with real-world opportunities to apply their skills and solve actual problems.

The winning team, Team ServeIT from the Early College of Guilford in Guilford County, created an app that enables students to earn volunteer hours and driving experience simultaneously. The app does this by allowing students to deliver donations to local nonprofit organizations. Team members include Siddarth Giridharan, Madeline Chandler, and Olivia Mosca.

Second place was awarded to Team Autism Assist from Cox Mill High School in Cabarrus County. They developed an app that uses AI to assist users on the autism spectrum to access resources about Autism Spectrum Disorder and to help recognize social cues. The team consisted of Sarthak Gupta, Gaurika Gupta, and Aditya Mehta.

The third place award went to Team SkinSense from Enloe High School in Wake County. Their app is designed to detect melanoma by using a machine-learning model that evaluates the likelihood of an uploaded image being melanoma. The app then encourages users to seek professional medical help as needed. Team members include Saiakhil Chilaka, Neil Patel, Rosalind Eccles, Vedant Iyer, and Kunwar Kalra.

The competition, hosted by the North Carolina Business Committee for Education and sponsored by Lenovo, challenged student teams to design and develop an Android mobile application to address a problem in their school or community. This year, the competition set participation records with 95 teams from across 26 counties registering to participate, engaging more than 370 students.

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This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This story was generated in part by AI and edited by Cardinal & Pine staff.

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