By Ima Christian
In the Summer of 2014, my younger siblings and I developed an app called Five-O that allows citizens to rate, review and track their interactions with law enforcement. We received over 10,000 downloads within the first two weeks of making the app available for Android due to all of the national and international media attention we were receiving. We were doing up to 50 interviews a week within the first month of releasing the app—all while balancing school work, and, in my case, college applications. In December 2015, we competed in the international Innovating Justice Challenge at The Hague, Netherlands, where we won first place and €20,000 for our work on Five-O.
My parents, Karen Abrams and Leon Christian, planted the seeds of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math in my siblings and I from an early age when they exposed us to hands-on tools such as LEGO Mindstorm Robotics, a robot-building and programming kit; Scratch Programming, a free programming language where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations; as well as App Inventor, a visual, blocks language for building Android Apps. While my siblings and I continue to share our passion for Computer Science and technology through various community tech days in our hometown of Atlanta, GA, we felt a specific desire to give back to students in Guyana by creating our project, STEM Guyana, where our mission is to truly unleash the world-class potential of Guyana’s youth.
