The winning team from a Phoenix hackathon thinks high school students are key to cleaner air.
John Yee’s team captured first place at the Innovate Phoenix challenge held Dec. 12 at Venture Cafe in downtown Phoenix. The challenge was to come up with a plan to tackle PM2.5 (soot and fine particles) and PM10 (dust).
“None of us were actually air quality experts. None of us were scientists. None of us knew anything about environmental policy,” Yee said. “It really was like five strangers with seven hours to think of an idea.”
He said his team decided to focus on improving air quality by providing information and motivation to spark action, specifically through high schools.
“High schools have built in pride, built in community, and built in rivalries,” Yee said.
His team presented an idea centered around school competition, starting with posting air quality sensors at each school.
“We could start publishing a leader board that here's how the different high schools rank against each other when it comes to air quality. So sort of using that, that obviously then sort of builds more pride, more rivalry,” Yee said.
By installing sensors and displaying a leaderboard to show rankings, Yee said schools can compete against each other and communities can launch challenges and educational events like biking to school week and tree plantings.
“The interesting thing about our solution is that it was actually a combination of multiple different ideas or thoughts sort of mashed together, which is really great in terms of the spirit of innovation and design thinking,” Yee said. “It’s not about, sort of the single genius in the room, the single expert.”
Yee and fellow team members Alexander Foster, Joshua Banks, Kushal Gadamsetty and Charles Fayal each received $575 from the city’s Office of Innovation. Five teams of five people presented to a panel of judges and an audience of roughly 100 people.
A city spokesperson said the event is designed to spur ideas that could possibly be implemented at the city and to encourage winners to continue to develop their own ideas. Phoenix will explore the winning idea to determine potential next steps.
Previous hackathon winners have worked with Phoenix on materials to mitigate heat for the city’s chilled water fountains.
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