Need help balancing a chemistry equation? Now there’s an app for that.
A team of students at Wootton High School in Rockville designed the app, ChemHelper, which last week was named Best in State in the Verizon Innovative App Challenge for middle- and high-school students.
“We all worked hard and it paid off at the end,” Anush Kaovasia said. “If we win regionals, we should have a party.”
Kaovasia was a member of a team of six sophomores in Wootton’s Academy of Information Technology that developed ChemHelper as a class project. Nicholas Bottiglieri, Nicholas Chui, Pedrum Aidum, Solomon Sapiro and Yusuf Van Gieson completed the team.
“We had a brainstorming session and came up with, ‘I’m going to create an app to balance chemistry equations,’” Van Gieson said.
The app is useful, Van Gieson said, because balancing the equations is not a pleasant experience.
“We want to help others,” he said.
According to technology teacher Barbara Barry, the students had only about three months to develop their idea. Entries had to be submitted by Nov. 24.
“They put in a lot of time outside class,” Barry said.
This was the third year for the Verizon challenge, according to company spokeswoman Melanie Ortel. It was created to inspire innovation in students and encourage study of technology, she said.
For it, students were asked to develop a mobile app concept that addresses a need in their school or community.
Ten teams of sophomores from the Wootton IT academy entered the contest this year, Barry said. The ChemHelper team is the only Montgomery team to reach Best in State in the history of the competition. The students’ app will be judged against other high school winners in the Northeast region on Friday and if they are winners there, they will win $5,000 for their school’s technology program and vie for Best in Nation.
Four middle and four high school teams selected Best in Nation next month will win $15,000 for their school and present their apps at the National Technology Student Association Conference in Dallas in June.
The Wootton students submitted a video explaining the app, an essay on their work and screen shots of the app.
“You’d have to say we were working down to the wire,” Van Gieson said.
Bottiglieri said he was the only one in the group who wasn’t surprised when they got the email announcing that their app was tops in the state.
“I was extremely optimistic,” he said.