After competing against 87 other teams from 36 states, seniors Nova Faltin and Tyler Robert brought home a $525 cash prize from the Discover Your Genius Competition on Sept. 15.

“I’m kind of addicted to it now,” Robert said. “Being able to solve problems for your community and big companies and for them to see that and see you, there’s so many things you can get out of it.”

Faltin and Robert were tasked with creating or adding on to an app to bring communities together. They chose to add onto an app called Discord and make it more user friendly by adding features from other apps.

“We added a bunch of features from Slack and just anything that would make it easier for schools or work-related to make it better for people rather than switching from app to app,” Faltin said. “You could just do it all on Discord.”

Robert said users would be able to have different “tabs” for school or for work. Each of these, especially in schools, would have a monitor who can regulate what can and what can’t be seen.

The competitors had a week to complete their entries and submit their ideas. After being judged, the results came back almost a week later.

“I felt extremely anxious,” Faltin said. “I thought we did very well and that we would place somewhat decently so we were just really excited to see what we got.” 

Robert and Faltin’s entry ended up winning first place and got them a combined prize of $525 which they split between themselves.

“The idea that companies are looking to teenagers for their ideas, it’s revolutionary.” Robert said.