Jones Mays II, a junior at Houston's Carnegie Vanguard High School, first thought the email he received from Apple was spam.
Photo: Apple, Inc.
It said he was the winner of the company's Swift Student Challenge, a contest in which young people from around the globe use Apple's Swift Playgrounds software to show off their coding skills.
As it turned out, it was the real deal.
Contestants had to create apps that would help solve problems in their communities, and hundreds of students from 40 countries submitted entries.
The app Jones created is called Ivy, and it helps users easily identify invasive plant species. The idea came from the many days he spent working in the garden with his grandfather, who passed away a few years ago.
“My grandfather had a garden that he loved, and he grew so much food that he just allowed people from the community to come in and grab what they needed,” said Jones, who is about to start his senior year. “Even though he couldn’t walk at the end of his life, he used to point and that’s where I’d put down the seeds for him. But we always had to try to get rid of the kudzu vine — it was an ongoing fight.”
So Jones decided to create an app that honored his grandfather while helping other gardeners identify and get rid of invasive plants like kudzu.
“I’ve just really enjoyed being able to build programs that are able to display my creativity and passion in a fun and easy way,” he said.
This summer, Jones is going to be helping others learn programming languages. “I’ll be teaching the next generation of students what it means to learn computer science,” he said. “Because I truly believe that when you’re able to learn computer science, you are able to apply that to so many other fields.”
Jones comes from a long line of educators, including his mother, brother, and his late grandfather, who Mays thinks would approve of the app.
“He was a man of few words,” said Jones. “But I think he’d say, ‘Squirt, you did a good job.’”