Congratulations to the winners of the 2015 TeenTech Washington Techathon! The event was a huge success, with over fifty students from 13 different Seattle Schools participating. Participants were presented two open-ended prompts—identify a problem to solve, and take a collaborative approach rooted in the ‘sharing economy’—and three specific prompts—accessibility, homelessness, and disaster response/forewarning.

After a marathon day of team-based, real-world problem solving, our panel of judges chose three teams to move on the TeenTech World Pitch:

Winner: Smart Shelter

Keenan and Thomas developed a system to supply homeless people with food and other necessities, in exchange for community service hours. By creating a network of not-for-profit organizations, they plan to establish a points system where work is directly exchanged for food, and the traditional economy is not needed to get people back to work.

Winner: Solving Sight

Zoe and Sofia chose to tackle the issue of assisting blind and visually impaired people navigate urban environments. Their design uses sonar and technology similar to that in self-driving cars connected to a smartphone or smartwatch to guide people through difficult and dangerous environments.

Runner-Up: Voiceopedia

Michael, Deja, and Noah created a completely hands-free version of Wikipedia to assist the blind and visually impaired. Voiceopedia goes beyond normal voice control by opening articles automatically and identifying exactly what part of an article should be read aloud. Their plans for expansion include table of contents-based browsing, as well as support for sites like Wolfram|Alpha and general web-browsing.

 

TeenTechWA would like to thank our sponsors for their donation of prizes: