Fayetteville students seek solutions during internship

Nauman Malik (left) and Kyle Jiang, both juniors at Fayetteville High School, review the website Friday they developed for the Fayetteville Senior Activity and Wellness Center at the center. The two students won the NWA Tech Council’s Biz Ed Conference challenge for finding a solution for a small business problem and began an internship with HumanLink in Fayetteville.
Nauman Malik (left) and Kyle Jiang, both juniors at Fayetteville High School, review the website Friday they developed for the Fayetteville Senior Activity and Wellness Center at the center. The two students won the NWA Tech Council’s Biz Ed Conference challenge for finding a solution for a small business problem and began an internship with HumanLink in Fayetteville.

FAYETTEVILLE -- An internship with a local organization has allowed two Fayetteville High School students to work on developing an application that would make the Meals on Wheels program more efficient.

Juniors Kyle Jiang and Nauman Malik earned $1,000 and a two-week internship with HumanLink for a mobile dispatch application idea they developed at the Biz+Ed Conference in June.

New website ready

Fayetteville High School juniors Kyle Jiang and Nauman Malik also created a website for the Fayetteville Senior Activity and Wellness Center during the first week of their internship with HumanLink. The website, faysac.wordpress.com, allows center administration to edit it easily. “Hiring someone to come in and do web development is very costly,” Cayla Wilson, director, said. “I have to raise a lot of money for Meals on Wheels and operate the center so to have this done for us is fabulous, fabulous gift.”

Source: Staff report

They were one of five teams made of up area high school students that participated in the inaugural conference hosted by the Bentonville/Bella Vista Chamber of Commerce's NWA Tech Council. Each team was given a real-world business issue to try to solve with the guidance of education and business leaders.

HumanLink, an organization seeking to connect high-quality caregivers with elderly clients, presented the teens with the challenges the Fayetteville Senior Activity and Wellness Center were facing with its Meals on Wheels program.

A white board hangs on the wall near Ashton Alston's desk. Alston is the center's program assistant.

The white board is an organized schedule of which volunteers will deliver on which of the program's six routes on which days of the week. Clip boards labeled with each route sit in a rack below the white board. Each clip board contains information about each recipient, how many meals they will get, their address and a printed map to their location. They're updated once a week.

Alston then has to manually enter the data after the meals are delivered into the database via his desktop computer. It's a time-consuming task, he said.

The application would allow volunteers to receive their route, a list of recipients and maps of their homes on a mobile device. All other information, including items like the number meals served and dietary restrictions, would also be included. It would update Alston's database and remove the need for him to manually enter data.

A more efficient dispatch system could lead to more people receiving meals and possibly a higher volunteer retention, Alston said.

"(It) would make everything much more accurate, precise and faster for volunteers," he said. "I think it would just expedite the process just so much."

Ven Vandlamani, HumanLink CEO and co-founder, has offered advice and guidance as Jiang and Malik have worked on the application's prototype this week. He suggested they start with a version that could be viewed online before creating the version for mobile devices. He also introduced the two students to different software programs in which to work on the project.

"I'm absolutely loving this," Vandlamani said. "They're a fantastic team."

Vandlamani said he hopes his mentorship to Jiang and Malik helps them think about the customer.

"It's very easy to get caught up in the technology," he said.

The three visited the senior center their first day so Jiang and Malik could meet the people who work there and get a better understanding of how to help.

"We're not only providing this technology, but we're giving back to the community," Malik said. "That's a big part of it as well."

"Sometimes technology is a great solution," Jiang added. "That's why people use it, is because it makes things very effective and helps people."

Jiang and Malik will continue to work on their project when they complete the second week of the internship in August. They won't be able to finish it but plan to continue to work on it throughout the school year and have something "that's proven to work" by the Northwest Arkansas Tech Summit in November, Malik said.

The NWA Tech Council held the inaugural NWA Tech Summit last year.

NW News on 07/11/2015

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