Volunteer app: Tolt Middle School team takes Best in State with app connecting volunteers to opportunities

Published 4:13 pm Tuesday, January 27, 2015

It’s hard to say what the Best in State team of Tolt Middle School students found more appealing in a recent competition, the opportunity, or the swag.

“At first, we just wanted to do it for the prizes,” said Ryan LaTurner, an eighth grader.

His classmate Clayton Kristiansen diplomatically added, “We also thought it would be a fun experience to do an app.”

Both were great motivators. A prize of $20,000 for the winning school, plus a donation of several tablet computers were on the line in the third annual Verizon Innovative App Challenge, but so was the chance to design an app for a mobile device.

On this team, all seventh and eighth graders and friends working together on other technology problems in the Technology Student Association club, it turned out to be the challenge that drove them.

All six boys talk at once when asked about the project that won them a Best in State ranking in the nationwide competition.

“Per the challenge, we just needed to come up with the concept,” said Connor Aksama.

“And in the modern world, we figured that not a lot of people volunteer,” said LaTurner

“Jake (Tisdale) and I are in National Junior Honor Society, and we needed to do volunteer hours, too,” Kristiansen said.

So with all that in mind, along with the geography of the Valley, the boys created a plan for their iVolunteer app.

“It pinpoints places to volunteer,” explained LaTurner, and uses GPS data to show a user those places by their distance.

It also considers things specific to this Valley.

“For people who have bad cell coverage, we use a smaller information packet,” explained Vivek Patel.

They solve a lot of problems with their invented app, and they acknowledge that they may have created one with their choice of names. The “I” in iVolunteer is a reference to the first person, not to the Apple platform prefix.

“It’s on Android,” said Patel, explaining how the name came about.

As an afterthought, he said, “Husein (Syed), you’re the lawyer.”

They shouldn’t need a lawyer any time soon, though. The app itself doesn’t exist just yet.

Look for it in the next year, though, because after winning Best in State with just the concept — and a well-produced video — they say they plan to continue working on the app into the next school year. Aksama and Syed will still be at Tolt, but the group agreed that the others will pursue the concept in the Cedarcrest High School TSA program.

Following the state competition, the students’ app was judged in an eight-region competition Jan. 16. They were not selected Best in Region, and so they didn’t get the swag.

It’s OK, the prizes turned out to be not that important to this team, anyway.

Tolt students watch a video on an MIT professor’s bionics research, as a reward for winning Best in State in the Verizon Innovative App Challenge.

Clowning around with their award.