BHIS student won people’s choice award in the MIT app inventor hackathon

Mumbai: Yet another feather in a young inventor’s cap invention! 10-year-old Ayush Sankaran, grade 5 student of Billabong High International School, (BHIS) Malad, won first place in people’s choice and 4th place in judges award category in the Global MIT app inventor Hackathon 2020 from among 300+ apps from across the globe. Ayush along with another grade 5, student Jashith Narang from Bombay Scottish, Powai participated in under 18 youth categories. They chose the theme ‘Climate Change’ and their app was titled as Climate Catastrophe – Earth in Dearth of which results were declared on August 3.

Dr. Madhu Singh, Principal, BHIS, Malad, congratulated the students, teachers & parents and said, “We are very proud of Ayush’s achievement. He has won 3 different awards for different apps in this pandemic. Ayush has proven nothing is impossible by constantly innovating and building new inventions even during the lockdown.”

She also added, “BHIS has always been extremely supportive of students who wish to pursue their passion. Ayush had developed an interest in coding when the school introduced him to the scratch junior in grade 2.”

Ayush Sankaran, said, “I am very glad to have won the award. When we started we never expected to win – we just worked on the project because we had fun while making it. But it was a great surprise that our app topped the people’s choice category and came 4th in the judges’ category. It was a pleasant surprise for us and is huge great motivation to do more coding.”

Ayush along with Jashith registered for the competition before 19th June 2020. The competition themes were Better Resource Allocation (e.g., water scarcity, natural disaster response), Climate Change, Ending Poverty, Health Care (e.g., COVID-19, mental health), Learning and Working Remotely, Living Together, Social and Racial Justice, Social Impacts of Artificial Intelligence (e.g., biases, opportunities, equitability). The team had one week to complete their project.

The AppInventorVision2020 wanted children to create an app that will empower their fellow citizens in their community and give us a hopeful vision of a better tomorrow. Children were asked to choose any of the current global themes given to the above.

Both students created an app on climate change titled Climate catastrophe – Earth in Dearth. The app has three sections – Learn, test, and play – where kids can get answers to big questions on climate change and also learn about climate fighters in the real world, who are an inspiration for kid. In the test section, they get to answer a multiple choice quiz on climate change and then proceed ahead to a section that calculates your carbon footprint based on day to day choices you make. The third section consists of two games – one on deforestation and the other on renewable sources on energy. The experience of conceptualising, researching and creating the app was a phenomenal experience for the kids and the awards are a cherry on the cake. Kids created their app within a week.

Ayush has also won the All India game development competition titled “Fight against COVID” conducted by iRobokids in June 2020 and fun quiz app based on Harry Potter literature reader which has been awarded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as MIT app of the month

Full details of the hackathon are here: https://hack2020.appinventor.mit.edu/