Four Christmases ago, LaFayette High School sophomore Andrew Lemons received a Makey Makey, an invention kit made to spark curiosity in STEM by teaching children the fundamentals of circuitry.
That curiosity hasn’t left him. The 16-year-old recently won the 14th District Congressional App Challenge for his Animal Record Keeper app.
“In my free time at home, I’ll tinker around, watch YouTube videos on programming different things and just try different things out,” he said. “Anything that can be useful, I like to play with it to see what happens.”
Andrew got the idea for his award-winning app from his own experiences.
The Lemons got their Australian Shepherd, Izzy, about a year ago. This summer, they decided to bring her along on their annual vacation to Virginia Beach.
“At certain parks you need some vaccinations, and others you need different ones, so you never know what you need to bring,” said Andrew. “So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be really easy if you could just have them all on your phone and show it?'”
ARK stores pets’ pictures, medical records and reminders to administer medication or vaccines.
“Whenever the time comes where you need to provide that information – say, at an event or dog park – it can be easily shown or emailed,” he explained.
Andrew talked through different app ideas with his parents, Melissa and Jay Lemons. When he suggested the idea for ARK, they scoured app stores to make sure there was nothing like it.
He estimates he spent about 60 hours designing the app. He taught himself SwiftUI, a developer tool designed by Apple, by watching YouTube videos, reading through developer resources and forums, he said.
“He’s an exceptional kid,” said Melissa Lemons. “He’s extremely motivated.”
Andrew plans to offer the app to the public, but has encountered another problem he’ll have to figure out first. Many app stores require account holders to be 18 or older. The only way around that would be to create a company, he said, but he’s not sure if he wants to do that just yet.
“I’m running into some issues where I’m not old enough, so I’m trying to find a way around that,” said Andrew. “But I am definitely planning on making it public.”
Email Sabrina Bodon at sbodon@timesfreepress.com.