Team from Huntley High hopes its NASA app has the right stuff

Come spring, six Huntley High School students could be telling NASA officials at the Johnson Space Center in Houston about the app they’ve built as part of the space agency’s application development challenge.

The local students' team name is Project DJANKS after the participants' initials, Daniel Przybylko, Jack Peterson, Allen Williams, Nolan Laird, Kerellos Abdelmalak and Sammy Salby.

The app’s primary goal is to visualize the NASA Artemis II mission and track its path. The real, live Artemis II mission is expected to take off in 2026 after NASA recently announced more delays to the mission.

The Artemis II mission involves four astronauts who will circle the moon and come back to Earth, while Artemis III envisions two other astronauts landing on the moon. That mission is currently scheduled for 2027, according to the Associated Press.

NASA’s app development challenge is open to middle and high school students. At Huntley High, computer science teacher Michelle Zietlow is the lead teacher for the project, and it’s the first time Huntley students have participated.

Zietlow heard about the challenge after attending a computer science teacher conference over the summer. That led to her getting on a NASA mailing list, and the program got on her radar early in the school year.

The students said they were good friends heading into the project who shared an affinity for the subject.

“We wanted to deepen our love” of space through a project, Peterson, a senior, said.

When the group heard about the app challenge, “we knew it would give us a good topic,” said Przybylko, also a senior.

The students are in a software engineering course where the goal is to create an app and make it the best it can be, fellow senior Laird said.

Other projects students are working on include an app where their peers can send in homework questions and have a teacher or National Honor Society tutor answer them. There’s also an app that works like Google Maps but shows the best way around the school, as well as a mobile app focusing on fitness and nutrition, Zietlow said.

One of the ideas Laird had for the class was the tutor app, and he enjoys hearing about its progress during status updates.

The NASA challenge is not the first real-world connection Zietlow’s students have had. In 2014, Zietlow encouraged students to code and play their version of the then-popular mobile app game Flappy Bird through an international promotion called Hour of Code. That’s an initiative that seeks “to demystify coding and show that anyone can learn the basics, inspiring future interest in computer science,” according to the Hour of Code website, hourofcode.com/us.

The Huntley High students shared their work with children at Martin Elementary in Lake in the Hills in November, and hosted a community presentation at the Huntley Area Public Library on Dec. 2. Community outreach is required for the project.

The students have a deep technical knowledge of the project but used an analogy of watching a runner in a race to explain to the Martin students how it works. They explained it was like seeing where a runner is on the track and how far they’ve run.

Zietlow said the students “have put in countless hours both inside and outside of class to make this app come together. It has also been really fun watching them grow in their teamwork and communication skills. And, watching them present to the third graders and at the library made me so proud of what they have accomplished. Their enthusiasm and dedication have left me inspired and energized.”

The teens are also balancing their work on the app with other rigorous courses, jobs, sports and extracurriculars. Laird said he’s stayed up until midnight to work on the project. The group had a standing appointment for the collaboration at 11 a.m. Sundays, when they would meet on the chat app Discord or in person at the Huntley Library. The students also have mentors who they check in with and who provide guidance.

With the school term winding down, the students were putting the final touches on the project, which culminated in a video submission due Dec. 11.

With that submitted, the team will have to wait and see how it went. If they advance, next would come an interview with NASA. If the team is among the top teams nationally, they would fly to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to make an in-person presentation to NASA in April.

Przybylko said he’s applying to colleges for aerospace engineering. His top-choice schools include Georgia Tech, Illinois, Purdue and Colorado-Boulder.

The app is not available to the public, but would be used by NASA and run on a PC, Zietlow said.

Next semester, the students plan to embark on another project, while hopefully juggling interviews and a trip to Houston.

Zietlow said she plans to offer the NASA challenge again, and hopes future students will take her up on the offer.