As senior Matthew Lundeen sat in his third hour English class on Feb. 26, time felt frozen in place. His iPad displated a live YouTube video, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that was about to announce the winners of their App Development Challenge. After nine minutes and eleven seconds of torture, Prospect’s Computer Science Club (CSC) was declared one of the four winners from around the globe.
“I jumped out of my seat, [and] I ran to the hall to tell people,” Lundeen said. “It was [a] very exciting … and rewarding moment.”
For the past 10 weeks, Lundeen along with two other seniors and two other sophomores participated in NASA’s App Development Challenge. The objective given by NASA was to create an app that could display the path of Artemis Two (a future mission to the moon set to launch in 2026, according to NASA) using the data provided by NASA, use colors to represent the different phases of the mission and rank different antennas and process their data.
There were three phases of the process, where the team would receive more data if they were selected to move on. By the third phase, the group had to attend a Zoom meeting with other NASA engineers and present their app to them.
As winners, the group will be flown out to Houston, Texas to the Johnson Space Center, where they will have to present their app three more times to groups of NASA employees, engineers and the public. Furthermore, the group will get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the facility.
CSC sponsor Paul Henning said that the group was simply astonishing.
“We had neve done this particular challenge before,” Henning said. “I don’t know how many schools they competed against, but it was around the world and for [them to be] one of four [teams] to get selected … I mean, it’s awesome.”
Henning also stressed that the entire process was entirely student based. Lundeen had been coding since elementary school, and he was the first to take charge when Henning mentioned the opportunities.
“Me and a few other guys decide to form a team and work together for it.
We used all that time [ten weeks],” Lundeen said. “So it was working a little bit in the mornings before school, … a lot at home, on weekends and wherever else we could.”
Not only was time a challenge, but programming the app itself was a difficult feat. One particular problem occurred when NASA didn’t provide the group with the necessary data to calculate how the ship rotates around the Earth.
“We had to move around different data points and really spend a lot of extra time making sure that everything was accurate,” Lundeen said.
Despite the setbacks, the group was beyond determined to finish. In the end, Lundeen was extremely satisfied with the functionality of the app and his team.
“Seeing our app function and actually being able to see it at the end, that was very rewarding,” Lundeen said. “We were all able to grow even closer as friends and with Henning, which was awesome.”
