In September, 2018 a staff member at my school lost their 19th month year old daughter in a tragic accident that happened when the child was left in a car and died of a heat-related illness. After seeing how an incident had drastically affected my community and made me realize that things like this can happen to anyone, I wanted to find a way to prevent an event like this from happening anywhere and to anyone, without adding one more thing that an overwhelmed parent would have to do. During this time, my computer science teacher had recommended that I should participate in the Congressional App Challenge because there were only a few weeks left. The incident gave me a reason to participate and even though I had a limited amount of time, I was able to submit my idea for an app called “Car Seat Check” in December, 2018.
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During my senior year, I finally had the opportunity to bring this idea to fruition. With a solid foundation in C++, I was able to create a car seat with a key feature of buckle status detection with text notification.