Teens Win at NASA Hackathon with COVID-19 Project

Three Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) students competed in the Greater Huntsville Regional NASA Space Apps 2020 Challenge last month and won Most Impactful Solution. The ASFA Math-Science department students who were on the team named XSort are seniors Longji (Jerry) Chen, Longxiang (Jim) Chen, and freshman Elias (Eli) Mrug. Mrug lives in Vestavia Hills.

“This is an exceptional achievement for high school students,” said Xiang (Susie) Zhao, Ph.D local lead for the NASA Space Apps Challenge. 

“Our goal with the project was to help scientists analyze the effects of air pollution on the spread of COVID-19 in these unprecedented times,” said Jerry Chen. 

The ASFA team collected satellite data including COVID-19 infection cases and concentrations of multiple air pollutants such as CO, CH4, and O3. They then aggregated the data and visualized it on their own Reactjs app that they made from scratch. 

A demo of the project and the students’ published code for building the ReactJs app as well as data collection and processing is available on their Github.

Space Apps is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space. More than 26,000 people from nearly 150 countries joined together for the ninth annual event.

Submitted by Katie Roach.