The Pinewood Tech Club is launching two innovative projects this year: a new app that detects the availability of electric vehicle chargers as well as major improvements to a website where Pinewood students can recommend summer programs.
The idea for the EV app was inspired by a recurring problem that the club observed with the chargers in the Pinewood parking lot.
“You probably have seen people trying to get their car charged, and they have to drive through the back,” computer science teacher and Tech Club advisor Haggai Mark said. “Then they get to the end and there’s nothing available, [so] they have to back out again. It’s complicated and can be dangerous because of visibility.”
So far, the club has developed a website using TypeScript that displays the availability status of the four EV charging stations at Pinewood. The plan is to migrate the website into an app.
“The EV company has their own web application programming interface that we [are] able to use,” senior Tech Club co-president Denis Koterov said. “The website calls the API when you visit it, and you’ll see which EV chargers are available. The app is going to be a mirror of the website, essentially.”
Senior Tech Club co-president Tony Wu believes that the app will be convenient for the many EV drivers at Pinewood.
“I think it’s going to make their lives a lot easier,” Wu said. “People don’t know whether the chargers are available or not, but if you know that they’re all gone … then you can just plan accordingly.”
As for the summer program website, the Tech Club will update the code and add new features such as a comment section, personalized feed, and cleaner user interface.
Like the EV charger app, the summer program website will also provide students with useful insights about Pinewood.
“[People] can gain the perspective of potentially each student from Pinewood who has taken a summer program and cares to share what they have,” Mark said. “So that’s a lot more information [and it is] a lot more reliable.”
The EV charger and the summer program website are currently separate programs. However, a long-term goal for the Tech Club is to merge all of these programs in one app managed by Pinewood.
“[The club wants to create useful apps and services like] a super app that can have both the EV charging, the schedule, and maybe the Five-Star functionality,” Mark said.
Koterov said these projects align with the broader mission of the Tech Club, which is to help students turn their love of coding into projects that have an impact on the Pinewood community.
“The club is striving to bring industry-standard technologies to Pinewood,” Koterov said. “By the end of the year, you should be able to have enough foundation to make your own full-stack website that someone could use.”
