On Thursday Feb 26., it was a bright and sunny morning when U.S. Representative Kathy Castor commended seniors Ammar Omar, Sharan Santharam Srinivasan and Sujay Korada in the heart of Robinson.
The students have recently won the prestigious Congressional App Challenge [CAC], and will be recognized at the U.S. Capitol during the House of Code celebration in the spring, alongside other winners of congressional app competitions from across the country.
“We really want the best and the brightest across the country. We want to recognize them for their STEM skills. So this [CAC] is fairly new. It’s only about five or six years old, but it’s a way to encourage students across America into the STEM fields, and then give them recognition. And it’s no surprise they come from Robinson,” Castor said.
The app deserving of all this recognition is called Sunscreened and was designed to combat one of Florida’s most deadly adversaries: the sun. After entering your metrics into the app, it helps you track sun exposure, UV levels, how much time it takes for you to burn, when to reapply, what sunscreen to use and even how much vitamin D you’re producing. Its most valuable tool, however, is its AI skin analysis. When you upload pictures of your face to the app, it analyzes them using AI to detect damage, blemishes and even growths, telling its users how they’re affected by the sun.
Although the challenge is fairly new, it aligns with the progressive goals of the city of Tampa.
“It was started by the House of Representatives; we knew that we needed more students going into STEM fields,” Castor said. “In fact, the regional economic development group, the Tampa Bay Partnership, just highlighted that one of our goals for this entire region is to get more students interested in STEM fields. There are typically higher wage jobs at the end of that rainbow, and we need higher wage jobs in the Tampa Bay area.”
The award winners, all ranked in the top 10 in the IB class of 26, built the app from the ground up without even a formal education in coding.
“I’ve just always been interested in computers and making them work. I learned to code through YouTube, and then the main thing I wanted to do was focus on real-world applications, because that’s how you change the world,” Omar said.
While all three covered different aspects of the app, they unanimously decided that their main goal for the app was functionality.
“So, what we do often is, like, we’d give it to our parents, and we’d have them try it out and see if it was intuitive for them to use. Because an app like this has to be something that you can open, track your stuff in two minutes and then close again, and there’s not a big hurdle to actually use it,” Santharam Srinivasan said.
Although the seniors have secured their award, their efforts don’t stop here.
“The next step is to try and get a partnership to go to our app more, so we can get more users and just, like, raise awareness for skin health. And we’d love to work with dermatologists to make more complex models to help people track it [skin cancer] even better and long term, and to take into account more factors, I’d say,” Korada said.
As Robinson keeps producing the best and the brightest, the Congressional App Challenge is always available for aspiring knights in the STEM field, and the benefits are unlimited.
