How students built a web app with the potential to help frontline workers

Olly Cohen, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, founded a Google Developer Student Club to foster a community of tech enthusiasts eager to apply classroom theories to real-world projects. The club quickly grew, with 150 initial members and a focus on socially beneficial projects, such as an app for the visually impaired. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Olly and fellow club member Daniel Sosebee undertook a significant project to aid frontline healthcare workers by developing a web app that digitally tracks personal protective equipment (PPE) needs at Wash U’s medical center. Collaborating with Google employees, university professors, and medical experts, they created a serverless web application that efficiently manages PPE requests, demonstrating the club's impact potential and aligning with its mission to use technology for community betterment.