HOPE, IND. — A group of middle school students from Hauser Junior-Senior High School are the Best in State winners in the Verizon Innovative App Challenge.
The eighth-grade group created Speak Bot Pro, a mobile app focused on helping people who cannot speak for medical reasons or due to language barriers. The app allows them to use icons to communicate verbally.
The team was selected from more than 1,200 submissions nationwide and will get a $5,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation and tablets for each of the students on the team.
Voting is underway to help the team win the Fan Favorite award, which earns them an additional $15,000 and the chance to work with experts from the MIT Media Lab to turn their concept into a working app.
The Fan Favorite award allows the chance to become a national winner. The deadline for voting is Jan. 31.
To pick the Hauser Junior-Senior High School team’s Speak Bot Pro app for Fan Favorite, voters can text SPEAKBOT2 to 22333.
You can also vote by clicking here.
National winners will be announced Feb. 2.
The Verizon Innovative App Challenge was created to spark greater student interest in STEM (STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) as early as middle school and to make students aware of the many exciting career opportunities that technology skills hold for their futures.