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Durango app development teams move to Go Code Colorado finals

The Durango Herald - 5/7/2018

Two teams of Durango app developers dreaming of creating the next big thing on your smartphone are headed to Denver for the Go Code competition on June 7.

Three Durango High School students ? Georgia Witchel, 16; Kaitlyn Ashburn, 16; and Nicholas Woodward, 16 ? have an app in initial development stage that would help people suffering from disabilities determine which Colorado city would best accommodate their lifestyle.

Another trio from Fort Lewis College ? recent graduates Gretchen Potts, Rayven Bowman and assistant professor Anthony Carton ? is working on an app that would allow managers of fleet vehicles or even small businesses with only one or two cars to determine if alternative-fueled vehicles would make more sense for them.

"It started as a class project," Potts said. "We never anticipated we'd make it beyond the Challenge Weekend."

Challenge Weekend is the first round of the Go Code competition, which was established by Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams to develop apps that make better use of publicly available data and to inspire a new generation of computer coders.

Mentor Weekend was held April 27-28 in Boulder, when the finalists, 10 teams from around the state, were brought in for training sessions with professional coders and business consultants to sharpen their software, improve their business plans and polish their pitch presentations.

On June 7 in Denver, a champion app team will be crowned after one group of judges goes through their apps for computer perfection and another rates the teams' pitches for funding.

Witchel said the DHS team, which calls itself Felix, the Latin word for happy, decided to focus on an app in the health care field after noticing a lot of publicly available health data that the group believed was underused.

"Eventually, we want to publish maps, such as a heat map, and the brightest city ? say, Denver for people who use wheelchairs ? would be the community that is the most accommodating to wheelchairs than other communities," Witchel said.

The Felix team's app, she said, is currently in the "MVP" stage, which stands for Minimum Value Product. The MVP stage, she said, means "the app technically works but it has a lot of glitches and bugs that need to be worked out."

The team culls data from four or five different health databases to come up with its recommendations of a place to live for someone living with a disability.

"Right now, we want to improve the software, refine and better use data, and just a general cleaning up of the software," Witchel said.

Potts said the FLC team originated as a project in the Interactive Design II class taught by Carton. Bowman and Potts were two students who took up Carton's offer to help any students who wanted to enter the Go Code competition.

"I'm not necessarily a great coder. But what we are really good at is coming up with good ideas," Potts said.

After talking with several people who owned alternative-fueled vehicles, examining websites about the vehicles and looking at federal and state laws and tax breaks for alternative-fueled vehicles, Potts said the team settled on creating an app to clear the confusion surrounding use of the vehicles.

"We want to design a website that helps people, fleet managers mainly, make business decisions with more information about the feasibility of using alternative-fueled vehicles," she said.

Eventually, the group plans to refine the software to the point it can crunch out numbers estimating the expense of using gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicles compared with electric, hybrid or compressed natural gas vehicles.

Potts said the website would go beyond numbers.

"One big hassle is knowing where grant applications are, what tax incentives there are, just familiarizing yourself with the lingo," she said.

For the month the team has until June 7, Potts said they intend to run prototype software trials by people who manage fleets to get further critiques on how to improve their app.

Carton says he would like to develop an app that "takes the guess work out of what is a large expense for a small business."

parmijo@durangoherald.com

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