Student-Built, Community-Tested: The AI App Connecting North Carolinians to Critical Resources

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Education Leaders, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Satviki and Anwita, the first-place winning team from the NC AI Solve-a-Thon, and their coach Nina Darnell, Spark Lab leader for Cabarrus County Schools. Together they built NC Connect Link, an AI-powered app that helps people across North Carolina find jobs, housing, food, healthcare, and legal aid in one place.  Key Takeaways for Education Leaders -They built for real people. Satviki and Anwita designed NC Connect Link for people who are stressed, in a hurry, and not necessarily comfortable with technology, adding natural language input, multilingual support, and typo handling based on real user feedback. -Customer discovery is a learnable skill. The team reached out to libraries, local organizations, school teachers, and administrators to test their app before the competition and kept iterating until the last minute based on what they heard. -AI was a teammate, not a shortcut. They used Claude and ChatGPT to debug code and think through problems. -Students don't have to wait to make a difference. As Satviki put it: "We don't have to wait until we're older to make a real difference. We can start whenever our curiosity begins." -The app is still growing. NC Connect Link has expanded from major urban cities to all of North Carolina, rural and urban, and the team is working toward an App Store and Google Play launch by end of summer.