Mia Craven and Isabel Villegas reach for their dreams as they receive an outstanding achievement from their recent win at the annual FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) competition. This competition has allowed these two students to explore their technological talents and create a website based on an app constructed to helps teens and people everywhere. Thanks to their hard work and determination, Craven and Villegas scored first place overall against many other different schools and groups.

The girls took part in a contest, a computer science based summer program, that taught them how to code in a language called HTML. For this program, the students would have to create and build a website about their newfound app idea that they thought would help others. The two found out about the competition from Craven’s uncle who works for IBM, who is sponsoring the program, along with another group called AMI and he told her about it.

“I signed up sometime in July. I know that our Girls Who Code club had a registration sheet for anyone who wanted to sign up, too.” said Craven.

Craven and Villegas constructed a project called, “Concentration”, and they worked on this once a month over the course of four months. The app’s main purpose was to temporarily disable other apps functions so the person would be able to focus on their work. It eliminated any distractions, such as other apps like social media and games, that could lead to distractions and not getting work done. The main target for the product was students and teens in school trying to get homework and studying done, but struggled with focusing on school because of other distractions.

“We thought of our app idea because we personally struggle with distractions from apps and know that other students do too. We wanted to create the app so it would eliminate this problem,” said Craven.

The way this app works is there is a settings page where it listed all of the owner’s apps, and from there the user could select which ones they’d like to disable. Secondly, the person would set a timer for how long they would like the app to be disabled. After completing these steps the users apps won’t work until the timer runs out, even if the user changes their mind and decides to go back and use them.

To reward the girls for their success and hard work, Craven and Villegas won tickets to a conference called the Grace Hopper Convention. This is the world’s largest gathering of women from all over the world who are interested in technology. There was an estimation of 15,000 people who attended the conference, and the two girls were the only high school students who were invited to join, while the other attendants were either in college or older.

“The whole FOSS experience really made a huge impression on my life. Before the program, I wasn’t even thinking about going into computer science, but I’m really glad I joined because I learned a lot of new skills and found that I really like programming,” said Villegas.

Craven and Villegas are very grateful for this opportunity to learn more about technology and the world around them. They were exposed to new experiences and people. With their main support systems being their family, friends and mentors, the girls were able to achieve their goals and dreams.

“Something that I learned is that even if it may seem like the odds are against you, don’t give up because if you give it your 110%, you will succeed,” said Craven.