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Imagine an application on your phone that works like this: it’s late on a Friday evening in South Philadelphia and you’re getting ready to walk from your house to your friend’s house to watch a movie. Even though you’ve got mace in your pocket, you still feel helpless to eager criminals who could, at any point, jump out and take your wallet, your phone or worse. But if you could pull up an app that tells you the statistically smartest and safest route to walk, maybe you could avoid criminal behavior and preserve a little piece of mind.
A team of 15 to 20 students at The Academy at Palumbo, 1100 Catharine St., did just that and won a national Samsung competition that will yield the school $140,000 in technology and licenses.
Palumbo’s principal, Dr. Adrienne Wallace Chew, got the process rolling late last fall by slipping a flyer for the Samsung competition into the mailbox of one of her young teachers, Susan Lee.
“Originally, the topic was ‘Show how STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] can be used to improve the local community’,” Lee explained.
Over the next four months, she and her peer, Klint Kanopka, led students on their own time through Samsung’s “Solve for Tomorrow” contest.
Teachers initially sent in proposals with 255 winners selected. Lee and Kanopka were selected and then started getting students involved. There were 51 state winners and 15 were chosen to present to a panel of judges in Austin, Texas at SXSWedu this March. Judges included representatives from sponsoring companies (DirectTV and Adobe), but also a student from Harvard University and a former Congressman. Five national winners were chosen: one by community votes (G.W. Carver Middle School in Miami, Fla.), one by an employee ambassador (East Valley High School in Yakima, Wash.), and three by the judges’ panel: Sunburst Jr. High School in Sunburst, Mont., Oliver Street School in Newark, N.J., and Palumbo.
The students prepared a three-minute video that captured their project: determining the safest route from point A to point B with Palumbo’s corner at 11th and Catharine as Point A and the Charles Santore Branch of the Free Library, 932 S. Seventh St., as Point B. The results were surprising to the students.
One team member, 17-year-old Alex Wallace, joked that they realized some of the biggest intersections in the city are worth avoiding altogether.
“Avoid Broad and Market [streets]. We were evaluating how you would get across Broad and Market,” Wallace explained, then suggested the best way around it might be to “build a bridge.”
Another student, 15-year-old Tarzan MacMood, suggested that crime wasn’t foreign to Palumbo students and that the motivation to create safer pedestrian routes could yield real results and shared a personal story about a friend.
“He and his sister both got mugged, and he got all of his money stolen from his wallet. The other time was with his sister, which was practically the same thing, but she also lost her phone,” he went on. “Thinking about him and his sister, ever since last week, what route could he have taken? Maybe if he took a left, or what if he took a right? What if he went a different route? Maybe he could’ve avoided it.”
Using crime data, the team assigned a point value for each block based on the nature of crimes committed. Starting with one, which stands for little to no evidence of crime, and capping values at five, which is assigned for a violent crime, such as a shooting, a route’s safety can be determined by adding up the block values. The lowest sum becomes the safest route.
MacMood expressed surprise that what people might not expect is that the most dangerous routes are often on the biggest thoroughfares.
“It may be a main road, but is it the best choice?” he asked. “The longest route was actually the best route and the shortest route was actually the worst route. Are you going to go the longer or shorter route?”
With the help of their project’s results, South Philadelphians may think twice.
The team also made a website with a paired smartphone-scannable QR code that would direct pedestrians to their findings. In their three-minute video, they shared some essential Palumbo facts: 40 percent of the magnet school’s students are from South Philadelphia; 50 percent of students walk to school; 55 percent of the students from South Philadelphia walk at some point during their commute; and those students walk an average of 5.5 blocks.
The four students attributed the team’s success to egalitarian teamwork, across disciplines and ages. One of their youngest comrades, a freshmen named Emmanuel Williams, helped create the site (grasphilly.webs.com).
“He knows JavaScript,” MacMood noted.
The team worked through one of Philadelphia’s toughest winters in memory, meeting for hours after school and sometimes on the weekend, to combat (many) unexpected snow days.
The gravity of the win isn’t lost on the team’s young STEM enthusiasts. They’ve created a project that their much-older science-minded peers are ready to emulate. After their presentation in Austin, a German app-developer approached them with great interest. They’ve been asked to present their findings to Penn graduate students.
“Our whole team is going to be physicists,” 17-year-old Tiffany Ng quipped.
Quien Truong, 18, admitted “It feels surreal. It’s a lot to absorb and I will never stop smiling.”
But MacMood captured the essence of their accomplishment brilliantly: you never know where breakthroughs and innovation can emerge to change the world.
“We have something to offer. We’re not college students but we still have a mind, we have ideas, we’re innovative. Some of the greatest things come from unexpected sources,” he said. “Don’t underestimate us. Younger generations have a greater understanding of technology today. It’s easier for younger and future generations to develop technology because they understand it.”
The quirky, ironic circle of this story is that Palumbo will be receiving a huge boost in its technology department less than a year after 30 laptops were stolen from a laptop cart at the school during the summer.
“I was devastated but this is a wonderful blessing,” Chew explained. “We got more than [those computers] back and some.” ■
Contact Staff Writer Bill Chenevert at bchenevert@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117. Comment at southphillyreview.com/news/features.
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