LFU Freshman Creates Vocal App to Remind Users

by Ronnie Zamora/LFCISD

Evyn Garcia knows that people sometimes ignore reminders and alarms on mobile devices and computers. Some are too subtle.

So the 15-year-old freshman at Los Fresnos United had an idea for a project for his Computer Programming course taught by David Burlingame.

The 15-year-old son of Erica and Israel Leija, who is a student at the LFU Tech Academy, thought about a better way for people not to ignore reminders about meetings.

He realized people would not ignore verbal warnings on their mobile devices and computers which get louder and louder.

Evyn named the app “Annoying Alarm” for one simple reason: “If you ignore it, the app starts raising its voice at you continuously and becomes annoying – until you press the reset button.”

It’s hard to ignore an app which raises its voice. “It keeps repeating, and the voice gets more and more annoying.”

Other students also created apps to organize teachers, to cook or other projects. “I hope I got an ‘A’ in my project.”

Evyn first got an interest in computers in seventh grade, when he used an iPhone to create a movie using pictures which he would move slightly. He would use 10 photos in one second to appear that they were moving, like the way animated cartoons were first made a century ago.

Evyn took 500 photos for that first animation project that became a 15-second video. He used the Stop-Motion Studio app to create the movie.

Ever since then, stop-motion animation has become Evyn’s passion. He is interested in a career in that field or as a computer programmer in a government position to help protect the country from hackers.

“If that doesn’t work out, I hope to become an animator for Pixar.”