Every year, Foxconn organizes an innovation week under the name Funnovation Week, during which it gives the company's employees space for their own ideas and improvements. On the latest event in October 2021, Foxconn invited students from DELTA High School of Computer Science and Economics. It was its third-year students, Jan Volhejn and Jakub Kacálek, who came up with the idea of visualizing the movement of Pardubice's public transport vehicles. While waiting at the bus stop, people can find out exactly where their bus is.
"This years' theme for the students was 'Life in the city.' They had to come up with an idea which would make life easier not only for their peers but for all citizens in the city," says Radek Cerman, who is responsible for organizing Funnovation Week. "We were amazed by the projects submitted by students, not only by their sophistication but also by their focus. The students accurately guessed what people in Pardubice needed."
Foxconn liked the winning project so much that the company helped the students to present it to the director of Transport Company Pardubice, Ing. Tomáš Pelikán, who gave the project the green light. The students were able to connect the portal to the data on the current location of individual public transport vehicles and complete everything in a fully functional form.
"We have been thinking about creating an application which would show passengers the current location of Pardubice buses and trolleybuses for a long time," commented Tomáš Pelikán on the project. "When DELTA High School approached us with a similar project, we decided to give the students a chance and see whether they could stand up to the competition. We provided them with data to create the app, and the result was a pleasant surprise. The students came up with a good solution, and after incorporating our other requirements, we decided to use their project under the auspices of Transport Company Pardubice."
The director of DELTA High School, Ing. Jiří Formánek, also has words of praise for the resulting application and the circumstances of its creation. "Cooperation with Foxconn on the hackathon had three significant benefits for us. Foxconn came up with a great idea to focus the hackathon on improving life in Pardubice and with two ways how to significantly boost the motivation of students – first of all with exciting prizes, but also with the opportunity to present their results in front of the top management of a multinational technology company. This sort of opportunity is not quite usual at the age of 17 or 18."
