Students of Springbrook High School’s Academy of Information Technology (AOIT) program participated in the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s (NFTE) World Series of Innovation challenge this year. The NFTE challenge, presented by Microsoft, is a competition for students to design products or services that are meant to help the world.

    Students had to work in a group between two and five people and be between the ages of 11-24 years old. The groups that entered the contest were required to create a product proposal, app or game and shoot a one minute commercial that described how their product would work.

    After that, three finalist groups were chosen. For all eight categories there were two winning groups. The “People’s Choice” winner was chosen by popular vote, while a committee of judges carefully considered each finalist group to decide the “Adjudicators’ Choice” winner.

    This year, senior Alex Gutierrez and juniors Gustavo Quintero, Aaron Bloom, Dawit Tegen and Christopher Reyes won Adjudicators’ Choice for their tablet/smartphone game design. Their game aimed to help students study for the vocabulary on the SAT.

    “In our game, Eruditious, the player is attacked by a wave of enemies, which get more difficult after every wave. Randomly during the game four SAT words will appear to help the player complete the wave. For example, should a box say “clairvoyance self”, the player would permanently become harder to hit.This game should teach players many common SAT vocabulary words,” Bloom explained.

    This is not the first time these students entered the competition; they also made a design for last year’s competition.

    “It feels good to win, especially after we lost last year. My group mates and I put a lot of work into this project this time around and it’s nice to see that it paid off,” Quintero said.

    However, they were not the only Springbrook group to make it to the finals. Juniors Tai Bikamba, Baldric Nguena, Isaac Gracyalny, Alex Wong and Harold Burks were one of the top three finalists for the “40 chances food and nutrition” category with their proposal titled Me Gusta Studios.

   “There are two winning groups in my heart. I’m so proud of all the work that they did. They’re all amazing,” computer science teacher Michael Price stated.

    Both groups will receive a package of Coca-Cola branded merchandise and a $25 gift card from Amazon.com for being finalists. For winning, the group Eruditious will receive $2000 to be split among the group members, and $500 to fund Springbrook’s technology department.