President Obama gave first mention to the Hello Navi app development team at Resaca Middle School in Los Fresnos in his speech Tuesday at the White House Science Fair. Last week, the White House invited three of the six girls developing the Hello Navi mobile smart phone app to attend this year’s White House Science Fair to demonstrate their app. This year’s fair is focusing on girls and women who are excelling in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math. The Hello Navi app team just happens to be all female.
A group of six grade school girls in Los Fresnos, Texas took it upon themselves to solve a problem for blind kids. They built an app for them. The app, Hello Navi, first came from the imagination of a particular girl in the group, Grecia Cano. She says her heart went out to the blind students in her school who had a hard time figuring out how to get around. The girls 6th grade science teacher, Maggie Bolado was inspired to get the girls involved in building the app after seeing a tweet from the Verizon Innovative App Challenge. She says she simply asked which students were interested in learning how to build an app and these six girls came forward. The challenge invited the interest of over 1200 applicants, but it turns out navigation for the blind was a winning idea. The girls won the Verizon challenge and were recently whisked away to meet President Obama, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Kari Byron from MythBusters for their efforts.
