BENTONVILLE -- A three-day workshop this week for junior high school students focused on designing mobile applications, but the lessons they learned went beyond technology.
Students participating in the program worked in groups and presented their application proposals to a panel of seven judges Wednesday afternoon.
Each of the winning team's four members, all from Fulbright Junior High School, received $75 gift cards to Best Buy for their application called "Dollar Dash."
The application aimed to motivate people to exercise. The more exercise a person logs through the application, the larger the discount that can be obtained on merchandise at certain stores.
Most of the other six groups designed their applications around a similar idea.
The camp was free to the 26 seventh- and eighth-graders who signed up. The School District provided the space at Lincoln Junior High School, but Tata Consultancy Services provided everything else, including facilitators, material, lunches and prizes.
The schools weren't in session Monday through Wednesday.
Ahmed Khan, 12, a seventh-grader at Fulbright Junior High, was part of the Dollar Dash group. His parents signed him up for the program, which ran five hours per day Monday through Wednesday.
"I like building computers and fixing them, but this was something new for me and something I've always wanted to do. We got to cooperate a lot because we were always in groups working," he said.
Anthony Meinhardt, 14, a Fulbright eighth-grader, was a teammate of Ahmed's. He said his social skills improved because of the program.
"I didn't really know anyone coming in here. I've learned how to deal with people I didn't know," Anthony said.
Paul Stolt, the School District's director of communications, coordinated the workshop. Addressing the students Wednesday, he reviewed what they had done.
"It wasn't all about making an app, was it?" Stolt said. "You had to do some art, you had to do some science. You had to work together."
He compared the work they did to what people do every day in their work lives, which often involves solving problems in groups, he said.
Students were expected to define a problem and a solution as part of their application development. They practiced their presentations before making their pitches to judges, all of whom were associated with the information technology sector in Northwest Arkansas.
Tata Consultancy Services is a global company, which describes itself as an information technology services, consulting and business solutions organization. It has an office in Bentonville and has offered different technology-related programs to local students over the past several years.
Tata is big on giving back to the community, and workshops like the one offered this week are a way of showing children what career options are related to science, technology, engineering and math -- often abbreviated as STEM, said Ram Ramasamy, head of strategic accounts in Tata's Bentonville office.
"This is the period in which kids get to see and choose what might be their choice of career, what they'd like to do. So it does expose to them what STEM means. This is a way of educating them," Ramasamy said.
NW News on 10/13/2016