Brandon Wu – Fall 2020 Award Recipient

Get Involved Foundation is proud to announce its next award recipient, Brandon Wu, a junior at Palo Alto High School. For his service project, Brandon created and worked on a shower truck app for homeless people through Project WeHope.

To begin, hundreds of people across the country lack basic needs, forcing them into homelessness. As a result, Brandon decided to help these people by improving on a project that helps them locate shower trucks. Shower trucks are mobile trailers that offer showers and laundry services to the homeless, but are sometimes difficult to find. So, Brandon partnered with Project WeHope to work on an app that would help these people find nearby shower trucks to use.

At the beginning of his project, Brandon had previous programming knowledge from classes at school. However, he had never coded an app before. As a result, it was a great learning process for him and was able to build on his interest in coding. At the end of his project, Brandon was able to greatly improve the shower truck app by adding map integration and admin controls.

Through this project, Brandon was able to apply what he had learned from school to a real world project. He was also able to learn non-technical schools like empathizing, since he worked so closely with the homeless.

In the future, Brandon believes that his shower truck app has great potential for growth. As of now, the app tracks 6-7 shower trucks in the San Francisco area but there are always more shower trucks that can be tracked. Additionally, new features like iOS integration and resources databases could greatly improve the usefulness of the app. Brandon hopes that he or future students will be able to expand on the app just like he did. See his project overview video here. See his interview video here.