Dallas International School Alum Victoria Huang (’15) along with three fellow Computer Science freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania took first place in Social Impact/Civic Hacking in the PennApps competition! During the harsh, Pennsylvania winter, Huang and her teammates have witnessed “many people without homes brave the bitter cold in search of food” while local restaurants seem to just trash their leftovers. Inspired by this paradox, Huang and her teammates devised Foodship, a website that connects local restaurants to nearby homeless shelters using popular on-demand courier service, Postmates, to ship the food.

This January marked the thirteenth edition of PennApps, the nation’s first and largest student-run collegiate Hackathon, a two-day event where developers team up to create solutions to real-world dilemmas using the latest in hardware and software. Teams began tinkering with their hacks, or technological quick fixes, at 8 pm Friday 22 January and had only until Sunday 24 January at 9 am to develop a functional prototype. Submissions to this year’s Hackathon were judged on technical difficulty, originality, polish and usefulness. The Foodship team, comprised of Victoria Huang, Ming Zhang, Sanjana Sarkar, and Abha Vedul, is planning on turning this hack into a startup and is currently looking for sponsors.

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Dallas International School (DIS) is the only private school in the DFW metroplex offering a multilingual education via an international curriculum. DIS has more than 670 students in preschool through grade 12, located on two campuses. The Preschool (2yr+) through 4th grades are at 6039 Churchill Way, and the 5th through 12th grades are at 17811 Waterview Parkway. Both campuses are easily accessible for residents in Dallas, Plano, and Richardson. In 2015, DIS was ranked the #4 most challenging Private High School in the Nation by the Washington Post.