These Delaware students just won $5K in Verizon’s app challenge

Student teams from a Delaware middle school and high school were recently named the Best in State winners for the fifth annual Verizon Innovative Learning app challenge, with each team winning $5,000 in addition to tablets for each member.
The app competition tasks middle and high school students all around the country with designing a concept for a mobile app that will improve and solve societal issues in their schools and communities.
But SecureKnight, an app designed by a team from Camden’s Postlethwait Middle School that aims to keep community members safe, and Senior Spotlight, an app from Georgetown’s Sussex Central High School that hopes to help senior citizens connect and share their lives with others, are still just ideas at this point. Fortunately, the two teams, out of the 94 that won at the state level, have a chance to win one of eight Best in Nation awards, which will net each team an additional $15,000 and the opportunity to develop their app with the MIT Media Lab.
While the Best in Nation awards will be given out by a panel of education and industry experts, the public has a chance to give out one Fan Favorite award to a team by voting anytime between Jan. 16 and Feb. 14. The winners of the Best in Nation and Fan Favorite awards, which also include an all-expenses paid trip to the Technology Student Association Conference at Orlando this June, will be announced Feb. 15.
Back in the 2014-15 competition, a team of four girls from Cab Calloway School of the Arts in Wilmington won a Best in Nation award and ended up developing VirDoc, an app where high school biology classes could go through a virtual dissection of a fetal pig. VirDoc was also chosen as the Delaware winner for the Congressional App Challenge earlier this year.
Starting Jan. 16, you can vote for SecureKnight by texting SECKNIGHT to 22333, or Senior Spotlight by texting SENSPOT to the same number.
Check out the full list of Best in State winners here.