DES MOINES, Iowa — A talented group of high school students in Des Moines are launching yet another submission for NASA's App Development Challenge.
Earlier this year, Team FrostByte -- made up of five North High School students in Des Moines -- was selected as one of five top teams out of over 100 across the country, visiting the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The team's success is bringing even more students on board this time around. 11 students from four Des Moines high schools have crafted a new submission for 2025.
"We determined who would do the modeling, who would do the outreach, the social media and the coding itself, but as we quickly realized, all of us would have to do a little bit of everything," said Romas Pokhrel, a member of Team FrostByte since its inception.
Since October, members of the team have spent most of their free time developing an app that visualizes a deep space exploration to the moon.
In this year's challenge, students "create a video showcasing their application visualizing the flight path of Artemis II, while indicating which of SCaN’s antennas are available to communicate with Earth in real-time," according to the challenge website.
"Something that I'm most proud of is definitely like the teamwork," said Tatayana Hunter, who joined in October. "This app could not have been built without everyone on this team doing at least something to help."
NASA will select a certain number of teams to tour NASA's Houston facilities, meet industry leaders and present their app in April of 2025.
Win or lose, team members told Local 5 that the skills they gain from working on the app are invaluable.
"Project based learning has really allowed us to build quicker than the skills that we probably would have made during school," Pokhrel said.
"It has knocked my socks off with how much they have impressed me," said North HS teacher and team advisor Jennifer Kix. "There's a lot of stress on the kids, but yet they're here and work together and help each other out."