Finally--an app that lets you listen and respond to Youth Radio's stories using your Android device! And what’s even better: we made this thing! Using a tool called  App Inventor, a team of young people from Youth Radio Interactive (YRI) worked with mentors and partners from MIT Media Lab to design and code everything you can see, hear, and do on the app! Use our app to listen to stories from our archives, and—our favorite part—share your photos and thoughts by responding to polls you’ll find attached to each feature story. That way, we can include YOUR story in our future reporting. We look forward to the stories we’ll tell together!

How We Did It:

We divided our young people into teams to create five different prototypes. Then, they presented their apps to our App Inventor partners including engineers from Google, MIT, and University of San Francisco. We combined two ideas to create the design for the Youth Radio app. We decided we wanted the app to feature our stories, and collect photo responses as well as poll answers from our listeners. The challenge: App Inventor wasn't yet set up to support the functionality we wanted for the app. So our great MIT collaborators Andrew McKinney and Vehda Sayyaparaju agreed to build new a brand new tool inside App Inventor that allows designers to add, store, and download media (photos, audio, and more!). After much testing and iteration, we bring you the Youth Radio app!

The Team

[caption id="attachment_11385" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Kayla Garrett | YRI Intern[/caption]	[caption id="attachment_11384" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Senay Alkebu-lan | YRI Intern[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_11380" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Joy White | YRI Intern[/caption]	[caption id="attachment_11392" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Alvaro Magdeleno | YRI Intern[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_11382" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Shyra Gums | YRI Intern[/caption]	[caption id="attachment_12708" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Nkosi Richardson | YRI Intern[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_12733" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Kendrick Calkins | YRI Intern[/caption]	[caption id="attachment_11381" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Christina So | YRI Intern[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_12709" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Alex Kennedy | YRI Intern[/caption]	[caption id="attachment_12739" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Vedha Sayyaparaju | MIT App Inventor Project[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_12711" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Asha Richardson| YRI Manager[/caption]	[caption id="attachment_12710" align="aligncenter" width="150"] Andrew McKinney | MIT App Inventor Project[/caption]