Lily Perry, 19
Lily’s computer science journey began in high school. She participated in the Girls Who Code program for several years and various STEM clubs. Lily’s interest in programming grew and led to her first personal iOS project, Peacemon.
Through her work with the Girl Scouts of Hawaii, Lily attended the 61st Commission on the Status of Women as a United Nations Delegate in 2017. Discussions focused on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number five, Gender Equality. As she discussed the SDGs with global leaders, she realized the importance of involving youth, which led her to work on the app.
Peacemon is a fun game for youth to learn about the SDGs and inspires them to enact change in their communities. With a Hawaiian theme and SDG focus, Peacemon is a series of mini-games, each representing a different SDG. In one game, a taro-inspired character named Kalotar jumps over water in streams, filtering pollutants out of the water as it moves. The inspiration for Kalotar comes from taro, a plant ancient Hawaiians used to filter pollutants as water flowed through their ahupua’a (a unit in the Hawaiian system of land division). This app was the first iOS project Lily worked on. It taught her the basics of iOS app development. The skills she learned from working on Peacemon have proved invaluable to her throughout her hackathon journey thus far.
Lily attended her first hackathon during her freshman year. She looked forward to going because she wanted to create coding projects outside of the classroom with a collaborative team. Having previously worked on an iOS app by herself, she still enjoyed dabbling with Xcode in her free time. She found that hackathons provided an exciting and engaging way for her to continue her interest in app development while meeting interesting new people, networking with tech companies, and learning to use APIs from these companies. She loved her experiences from all six hackathons she attended in her freshman year and eagerly awaited the hackathons for the next year.
Lily’s favorite project from a hackathon is WeMove, an iOS app she co-developed to pair female users to walk over short distances when they would likely not call a Lyft or Uber but felt unsafe walking alone. The app is meant for female college students who feel unsafe walking from a library study session or a party back home at night or even for working women who need to walk a few blocks to a subway or bus stop after a late night at the office. Her team and she were proud to win the Best Mobile App category sponsored by Zynga at AthenaHacks in Spring 2019 for their hard work on the project. She enjoyed working on WeMove because it allowed her to explore her passion for iOS app development and learn more about app design while creating a product that she could see herself using.
Lily is currently a sophomore at the University of Southern California studying computer science.
Quick Facts
Lily Perry, 19
Lily’s computer science journey began in high school. She participated in the Girls Who Code program for several years and various STEM clubs. Lily’s interest in programming grew and led to her first personal iOS project, Peacemon.
Through her work with the Girl Scouts of Hawaii, Lily attended the 61st Commission on the Status of Women as a United Nations Delegate in 2017. Discussions focused on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number five, Gender Equality. As she discussed the SDGs with global leaders, she realized the importance of involving youth, which led her to work on the app.
Peacemon is a fun game for youth to learn about the SDGs and inspires them to enact change in their communities. With a Hawaiian theme and SDG focus, Peacemon is a series of mini-games, each representing a different SDG. In one game, a taro-inspired character named Kalotar jumps over water in streams, filtering pollutants out of the water as it moves. The inspiration for Kalotar comes from taro, a plant ancient Hawaiians used to filter pollutants as water flowed through their ahupua’a (a unit in the Hawaiian system of land division). This app was the first iOS project Lily worked on. It taught her the basics of iOS app development. The skills she learned from working on Peacemon have proved invaluable to her throughout her hackathon journey thus far.
Lily attended her first hackathon during her freshman year. She looked forward to going because she wanted to create coding projects outside of the classroom with a collaborative team. Having previously worked on an iOS app by herself, she still enjoyed dabbling with Xcode in her free time. She found that hackathons provided an exciting and engaging way for her to continue her interest in app development while meeting interesting new people, networking with tech companies, and learning to use APIs from these companies. She loved her experiences from all six hackathons she attended in her freshman year and eagerly awaited the hackathons for the next year.
Lily’s favorite project from a hackathon is WeMove, an iOS app she co-developed to pair female users to walk over short distances when they would likely not call a Lyft or Uber but felt unsafe walking alone. The app is meant for female college students who feel unsafe walking from a library study session or a party back home at night or even for working women who need to walk a few blocks to a subway or bus stop after a late night at the office. Her team and she were proud to win the Best Mobile App category sponsored by Zynga at AthenaHacks in Spring 2019 for their hard work on the project. She enjoyed working on WeMove because it allowed her to explore her passion for iOS app development and learn more about app design while creating a product that she could see herself using.
Lily is currently a sophomore at the University of Southern California studying computer science.
