Student-created app to guide shoppers around Downtown Summerlin

Finding stores at Downtown Summerlin will be getting easier, thanks to West Career & Technical Academy students.

Marketing students from the school at 11945 W. Charleston Blvd. are working on a Google Maps application that will allow shoppers to navigate the 106-acre, 1.6 million-square-foot shopping destination’s 150 stores using their smartphones.

The idea for the app came from junior Jacob House, 17.

“Downtown Summerlin is the newest mall in the area, so I proposed to (West marketing teacher Kelli Compton), why not have the school develop an indoor map for Downtown Summerlin?”, House said. “It’s actually kind of a funny story, how I came up with the idea. So, I was walking around Downtown Summerlin when it first opened, and I really had to go to the bathroom. And I was, like, ‘Where are the restrooms in this place?’, and I could not find any.”

He recalled how McCarran International Airport had an indoor map app for finding things such as specific stores and amenities and thought Downtown Summerlin, 1980 Festival Plaza Drive, should have one as well. He proposed the idea before winter break.

House said the appeal was that the app could be further utilized by integrating it into Downtown Summerlin’s website, downtownsummerlin.com.

“It’s free to host on Google, so, cost-wise, it’s very cost (effective),” he said.

House and classmate Mariah Torres, 17, have been working on the project. Both are in the information technology program. She said she wanted to be a part of it to better learn the technical aspects.

Torres said she’d never heard of an interactive map like this before, so she was interested to learn more.

“I thought it would be an experience, and I wanted to be part of something like this,” she said.

Before this, the students’ marketing classes had them doing assignments such as preparing material for the Nevada Association for Career and Technical Education’s summer conference and promotional material for health activist Helene Neville’s campaign to run across the country. One of their public service announcements for the latter campaign was used on television.

“This is something completely new,” House said of the Downtown Summerlin app. “Most of what we do in this class is marketing and finance. If anything, we’d be doing it in our IT program class, but I’d proposed it to my IT teacher, and he said no, so I walked across the hall and presented it to (Compton), and she got the thing running pretty quickly.”

“He didn’t think it would actually work,” Torres said of their IT teacher, Snehal Bhakta.

But Compton saw its potential immediately.

“I felt any kind of relationship with community partners is going to provide a good rapport with the community, and any kind of experience that students can get from completing projects like this one is not only going to provide them with a real-world setting, it is real world,” Compton said. “That’s what we’re trying to prepare them for, so, anything like that is … my ultimate goal, to get them internships, to get them placed in job experience situations and to benefit the community in some way. … This is a way to give back.”

Along with McCarran, Fashion Show mall, Caesars and the MGM Grand already have the Google Maps app specific to their offerings, House learned. He said Downtown Summerlin’s app would be similar to those.

Downtown Summerlin already has 22 freestanding signs throughout the property indicating where stores are, but Vicki Rousseau, Hughes director of marketing, said the app comes with a convenience factor.

“It’s part of a partnership we’ve been developing with (West Tech),” she said. “It’s a Google-certified school, so they work in that realm. … We’d been looking at creating an interactive (Google Maps app) because when people are out and about, something that they always have with them are their mobile devices. So, it’s something we’d been looking into, and it just dovetailed in with each other.

“Who’s more in tune with technology than high school kids?”, Rousseau added. “They’re comfortable with it; they grew up with it.”

While House expected to do much of the computer mapping, Google’s technical crew will handle that aspect. The students are responsible for contacting each store and gathering its information. The stores can also link to the map to provide shoppers with more specifics.

The students initially thought they would handle all aspects of preparing information for the app, but Google representatives said they had uploading the information covered.

“They have the ability to upload the maps and calibrate everything,” House said. “That’s actually a good thing because they can calibrate all the stuff, and they have much more advanced equipment than we have to do that. I’m not in this so much to build the whole thing, but I want to create the best experience for our customer. If that is achieved by Google sending out a field team and using their equipment to upload the plans, I’m perfectly fine with that.”

On April 15, roughly 150 students toured Downtown Summerlin and met with store managers from Macy’s, California Pizza Kitchen, Ribs & Burgers and Gelato Messina (which have the same owner) and Wonderland Bakery. The store managers talked with them about entrepreneurship, what it takes to run a business and managing a store. They also toured the office tower.

House and Torres, along with classmate Anastasia Cabrera, 17, toured Downtown Summerlin and got the “chance to ask people directly (what’s needed) for the app,” Torres said.

She said her business classes from last year and this year helped prepare her for the task, especially when it came to meeting with business people, understanding marketing terminology and understanding the scope of what they need to market the venues.

Gathering the information was set to take a couple months, with the app likely to be unveiled at the end of the school year, which is June 4.

To reach Summerlin Area View reporter Jan Hogan, email jhogan@viewnews.com or call 702-387-2949.