Communications of the ACM
Interview With 13-Year-Old MIT App Inventor Winner Arjun Kumar
The EX School Bus Locator, created by Arjun Kumar, helps parents see the location of their child's school bus on a map, verify whether their child is actually on board, and learn when the bus will reach their stop.
Credit: The Hindu
In an interview, Arjun Kumar, the winner of the 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology App Inventor contest for the K-8 division for the EZ School Bus Locator, discusses what he has been doing over the past year.
The app helps parents view the location of their child's school bus on a map, check whether their child is present inside the school bus, and know when the school bus will reach home. At first, when a user sends a message to the app in a specific format, it sends location details back to the sender. With daily updates, the app becomes a complete school bus location tracker that also can track the presence of the child inside the bus, according to Kumar.
Before developing the app, Kumar did research on the Web to understand the latest trends and news related to technology. Although the total number of downloads is not that impressive, mostly due to lack of awareness, the source code has been downloaded more than 2,000 times, Kumar notes.
He is currently working on a women and teens safety app that will help users get assistance when they are in danger by sending an SOS message to preset phone numbers and sharing their location details with them.
From Tech Republic
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