THERE’S AN
APP FOR THAT
An EAST project from Cross County High - A New Tech School
I
n today’s society, we use apps for everything. Tracking finances, investing, staying connected. Have you come across an app geared towards helping navigate and learn your local parks’ history recently? Thanks to Macie McCommon, Ciara Stephens, and Lexi Jarret, all ninth-grade EAST students at Cross County High School, the people of their community now have this access at their fingertips. With the assistance of their facilitator, Jason Blake, these students created an immersive 360° tour of the Parkin Archeological State Park Museum and became a 2020 Congressional App Challenge Winner.
Where did the project idea originate? Jason: This project began with an idea from one of our community partners who wanted to take people on a trip through history by way of the St. Francis River. We proposed the idea as part of our Museums on Main Street Waterways project but have since expanded beyond the waterway and it now encompasses the entire park. Since COVID-19, we have had to adjust some of our original plans, but we are still hoping, in the future, to fulfill the original vision of this project. Lexi: Within the app you are able to navigate using points of interest that allow you to move around to different areas and also to view content such as high resolution images and video snippets that give a deeper look at life along the St. Francis River throughout history.
What inspired you to complete the project? If it is not complete, what inspires you to keep going? Macie: We worked with a ton of community members to collect footage and stories about the park’s history and life on the St. Francis River. We went out and filmed footage for a 360° tour. We collected footage for almost a year and a half, and then, COVID-19 hit. We knew that we had to figure out how to help the park stay relevant. The project was nearly done, so our goal became to help the parks remain open and relevant for the future. 4
EAST QUARTERLY | EASTinitiative.org
What challenges have you encountered in trying to complete the project? Macie: The obvious challenge has been COVID-19, but in trying to work through that issue, we found the solution to completing this project. When everything shut down, it was harder to get field trips and interviews. We were about 50 percent done when we left for Spring Break and never returned to school. Not being able to meet regularly sharpened our planning skills. They were essential to making sure we didn’t forget anything when we did get the chance to work with our partners from the city. Another challenge we faced was what to do with all of the information we collected. Mrs. Shannon Sullivan — community leader from the city — once told us that it’s easy to get too much information, and sorting through it all can be difficult, which we found true. We just chipped away until it told the story we felt we needed to tell. Once we got all the footage, we also faced the problem of what to do with it. That was probably our biggest hurdle. It wasn’t until we sat down and looked at how COVID had impacted museums that we investigated, creating a 360° tour and incorporating our footage into footage we had of the waterways.
How many times did you build or test your project before it became functional? If you are still making it, please tell me how close you are to completing it? Macie: We spent most of the time just trying to figure out how to put it all together and what the product would be. Once we had a clear idea of the software we would use, the first version took approximately two weeks to create. We have updated it several times, with the most recent being over the past weekend, to work out a bug that was causing our interest points (buttons) to not work on a mobile device. Once it was created, we spent about a week learning how to put it on our website and make it functional.
