16. Urban Apps + Maps BITS Summer Program

Post date: Aug 12, 2014 11:33:41 PM

Video demonstration

I haven't mentioned this on the site, but I recently completed a 5 to 6 week summer program during which I got the chance to work with a fellow engineering student, mentoring five highly talented high school students from the Philadelphia area! I'm not going to go into a lot of detail in this post since there is already a website dedicated to the Urban Apps + Maps Building Information Technology Skills (BIT) program. The program's website is still being updated with more content, such as video and pictures. I will create another post when I see the program's website is update with more visual content.

Urban Apps + Maps' logo

For now, just know the program, and the mission of Urban Apps + Maps in general, is basically to show urban youth in Philadelphia the potential in pursuing careers in information technology, promote technological creativity within the urban context, and to lower the gap between the amount of urban consumers and creators (where the former is notably higher than the latter).

The BITS program specifically is composed of many teams, each of which contain one or two mentors and also various students. I got the opportunity to be a mentor in the "Engineering Group", in which my team managed to create a cool project which the students came up with.

Left is a picture of the car, whereas right is a screenshot of the Android app taken in Eclipse

Unfortunately, one of the projects we were supposed to complete could not get finished. I managed to finish the project after the program's end. The video above is the project I'm speaking of.