Altona students win app creation challenge at state level

Back row, from left: eighth grader Carolyn Qiu, seventh grader Sterling Gardner and seventh grader Advika Jayanti. Front row, from left: seventh graders Jeffrey Hew and Rachel Su. They created Diction Defender, an app designed to help students and adults improve their writing skills while having fun in a game environment. (Matthew Jonas / Staff Photographer)

Five Altona Middle School students recently won best of state and best in the region for middle schoolers for their idea for a writing skills app.

The students — eighth-grader Carolyn Qiu and seventh-graders Rachel Su, Advika Jayanti, Jeffrey Hew and Sterling Gardner — won the awards in the Verizon Innovative App Challenge for their "Diction Defender" app concept. The challenge is open to middle and high school students.

Diction Defender is an app designed to help students and adults improve their writing skills while having fun in a game environment.

Advika started the team, approaching computer science teacher Mollie Kelleher to serve as the coach and then recruiting her friends. She said she wanted to enter the contest because she's interested in coding as a future career.

The students said their biggest challenge was coming up with an original idea that would solve a problem. They had to research each idea to make sure there wasn't something similar already available, and said they quickly realized that many of their ideas had already been turned into apps.

Other ideas proved too difficult, such as a virtual reality app that would treat vestibular disorder, or had to be scuttled because of copyright challenges, such as an app that would play a piece of music to help student musicians.

"We had so many good ideas that didn't work out," Rachel said.

Added Advika, "The more you fail, the better. You get more creative."

Their writing app idea came from personal experience.

Several of the team members have immigrant parents and learned English as a second language, while all said writing isn't their favorite subject.

So they came up with an app that teaches good word choices, sentence structure and grammar through a beach survival game with different levels to unlock that are shown on a map.

"It's for anyone who wants to improve writing skills," Carolyn said. "I feel like it will really help people, especially immigrants."

Once they finalized their concept, the students wrote an essay detailing the problem their app would tackle and created a three-minute video. They also made a 30-second commercial for the app.

Working with "green screen" backgrounds proved especially challenging, they said, with one of the backgrounds turning some of their hair blue. It took about six hours of filming to make the three-minute video, they said.

"There was a bunch of criteria for the video," Sterling said.

Along with learning about making videos, they said, they learned tips that improved their own writing, as well as learning a lot from their coach about how to speak clearly and persuasively.

"We learned a lot of English skills," Advika said. "Before we did this, we all didn't like writing at all. Now, we enjoy it. We can help other people enjoy it."

For the contest, judges looked for original ideas, comprehensive research, clear explanations and creative presentations, choosing one middle school winner and one high school winner from each state.

The submissions then were narrowed to three in middle school and three in high school for each of the four regions: North, Midwest, South and West. These 24 best in region teams — including the Altona team — now will submit their concepts via webinar to a panel of judges.

For the national awards, the judges will select one middle school and one high school team from each region.

As a best in state winner, the Altona team members will receive mobile tablets, and their school will get $5,000. Teams that win at the national level learn coding from MIT experts to can create an actual app to launch, plus receive a $15,000 award for their schools.

The Altona students and other best of state winners also are competing for the App Challenge Fan Favorite Award. The team that receives the most votes will net the same prizes as the national winners.

Kelleher, the Altona students' coach, said she was thrilled to see them win at the state and regional level. The contest taught them about the design process and how to work through a time crunch as they created their presentation, she said.

"My students learned the meaning of commitment and tenacity," she said.

Amy Bounds: 303-473-1341, boundsa@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/boundsa

Source: Altona students win app creation challenge at state level