My son Kyle participated in the Notah Begay III (NB3) Foundation’s “Healthy Kids! Healthy Futures! Native American Youth App Contest”.  He teamed up with his friend Kaiya (who is homeschooled), to develop a mobile app idea targeted at Native Youth to help combat Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity.  Their mobile app design (previous blog post here) was selected for the final round and combined with a third applicant’s idea to incorporate exercise and meal information.  The three students then worked for another 6 weeks with a local software development company, 11 Online, to see their design become a reality and a minimum viable product (MVP) was created.  Kyle and Kaiya split the $1750 prize money with the third participant, a native high school student from Albuquerque.  Along with the award ceremony, we had a wonderful plant based dinner from ItalityNM.com from Jemez Pueblo, NM.

It was fun coaching Kyle and Kaiya through parts of the IBM Enterprise Design Thinking process to develop user desired outcomes to battle childhood Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity.  All the players worked hard to develop the Mobile App MVP … please take the time to look at the photo gallery below and small video showing the early modeling of the app.

Here is the Figma link that the video was made from (not sure how long this link will be good):

https://www.figma.com/file/Qz03jMJZHpwwMv2k8dE8uyYk/Trim-Tracker?node-id=0%3A1

Thanks again to the NB3 Foundation for creating a contest to challenge our native youth in the areas of design and software development!

– Dom