Johns Creek High School Students Among 9 Verizon App Challenge Winners

A group of Johns Creek High School students created a new Vroom App to solve after-school activity transportation issues faced by students. The Vroom App is available for free download in Google Play.

The app allows users to schedule rides home from school following after-school activities. The students are one of the nine Best in Nation winners of the fourth Verizon Innovative Learning App Challenge, a unique, no-coding-skills-needed app design contest. As 2015-16 winners, the students earned $20,000 from the Verizon Foundation for their school, and got to work alongside experts from the Center for Mobile Learning at the MIT Media Lab to turn their app concept into a real, working mobile application.

The 2016-17 App Challenge will be open to any team of middle and high school students, beginning Aug. 1. To enter, students only need to have an idea for an app that could solve a problem in their school or community. Past winners have been featured at the White House Science Fair and even gone on to sell their completed apps for cash.

For more information on how to register for the Verizon Innovative Learning App Challenge, or to download the completed apps, visit www.verizon.com/appchallenge. Follow us on Twitter (@VerizonGiving) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/verizonfoundation).

The Johns Creek team, which includes Stephen Hahn, Sneha Iyer, Preeti Iyer, Jacob Abramow,

Avery Paul and Tiffany Hsieh, owns the full rights to their app and hopes that it will be used by their classmates to arrange transportation quickly and easily.

As one of the nine Best in Nation winners of the App Challenge for 2015-16, the Vroom App team from Johns Creek High School had the chance to work with MIT Media Lab experts to turn their app idea into a real, working app, and earned $20,000 for their school. They recently presented their app at the Technology Student Association Conference in Nashville, Tenn.

It is predicted that the United States may be short nearly three million high-skilled workers by 2018. While the education system currently sees enough talent in math and science to fill the need for traditional STEM workers, less than 25% of those students enter STEM majors in college and of those that do, 38% of students who start with a STEM major do not graduate with one.1

The Verizon Innovative Learning App Challenge aims to inspire the next generation of creators by engaging students in STEM subjects in new ways, and giving students an opportunity to use technology to solve pressing problems.

About Verizon Wireless

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: VZ) generated nearly $132 billion in 2015 revenues. Verizon operates America’s most reliable wireless network, with more than 112 million retail connections nationwide. Headquartered in New York, the company also provides communications and entertainment services over America’s most advanced fiber-optic network, and delivers integrated business solutions to customers worldwide.

VERIZON’S ONLINE NEWS CENTER: Verizon news releases, executive speeches and biographies, media contacts and other information are available at Verizon’s online News Center at www.verizon.com/news/. News releases are also available through an RSS feed. To subscribe, visit www.verizon.com/about/rss-feeds/.

1 Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, 2011, STEM Report