The Digital Map Project (DMP) is a club that is building a physical and digital map of the school that can be accessed through an app or as a website and has had 27 different members over the past 3 years, founder of DMP, senior Kavinkumar Sainathan said. DMP received a commendation from Milpitas mayor Carmen Montano this past August, Sainathan said.
The project’s main goal is to have a fully functioning website and app ready to be released by the March STEAM Showcase, Sainathan said. The group is also planning a limited release of the app and website in January, he added.
Sainathan was inspired to create this project by “being lost at school on the first day here and not knowing where (his) classes were,” Sainathan said. “So I just wondered if anything could be done navigationally to improve the school.”
DMP received about $200 in funding from MHS to buy two 360-degree cameras in March 2021, second-in-lead and junior Vasista Ramachandruni said.
“We spent two weekends walking around every 10-15 feet, clicking a picture, and moving on,”
Sainathan said. “We stitched all those pictures as a map.” Besides funding for cameras, the club also received funding from MHS for various application program interfaces (API) to help assist their code, Ramachandruni said. APIs are a way of utilizing other companies’ services to help generate various functions for their app, he added.
Lead programmer and senior Johnny Palacios met Sainathan “in Ms. Hutchinson’s web design class and we sat next to each other,” Palacios said. “We introduced ourselves and figured out that we both do programming, so he introduced me to the project that started our friendship.”
The majority of Palacios’s programming experience came from Python, he said. For the app, however, he used Java, and for the website, he used HTML, which had a steep learning curve, Palacios said. Using new programming languages was challenging but satisfying, he said.
“We began work on the web version of the app last year, and after two weeks we could not get anything to work,” Ramachandruni said. “So, the core members sat down at a McDonalds, and during that one-hour period, we coded the first iteration of the website from scratch.”
DMP convenes online twice a week for roughly three-hour sessions, as well as an in-person club meeting at school during lunch on Tuesdays every two weeks, Ramachandruni said. School is the
first priority for all members, but they still make time every week for DMP in order to continually make progress, he added. One of the biggest challenges “was at the end of the 2022 school year when every authority figure that we knew—(former librarian), the principal, (and) the IT guy—either left school or just ended contact with us,” Sainathan said. “We weren’t able to work on anything for months,
and we couldn’t get any of our paid services in time because we got approval, but nobody actually
ever acted on it.”
Another significant challenge Sainathan faced was gathering a group of members, as it took him almost three weeks to gather enough members to begin their work, he said.
What started off as a relatively small project quickly developed into something much larger, with
more than 20 people involved in its creation and potentially thousands in its intended audience.