Where there’s a wheel, there’s a way

01 Mar 2017

The New Paper, 1 Mar 2017 - Article featured SP’s Diploma in Business Information Technology final-year student Mohamed Najulah who joined the poly as part of its pioneer Polytechnic Foundation Programme (PFP) in 2013. He will graduate in May with more than 800 other PFP students across the five polys. Born with brittle bone disease, he fractured his right leg more than five times in primary school and since then, has been using a wheelchair for his safety. Najulah started developing Happy Wheel, an app tapping on publicly available data sets and Google for wheelchair-friendly paths, at his first hackathon – the Transport and You(th) Hackathon in April 2015. The idea for the app came after he went for a talk at the Microsoft building at Marina Boulevard and realised his route there from the MRT station was full of barriers and steps. Happy Wheel won the People’s Choice award at the hackathon and was even highlighted on PM Lee Hsien Loong’s Facebook page after he attended the event. Najulah is still working on the app with seven course mates. Najulah has just finished an internship at A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing where he assisted in research to create barrier-free access for wheelchair users. He aspires to continue developing apps that will be useful to the society. Ms Chao Yunn Chyi, director of SP’s School of Mathematics & Science, shared that the programme was introduced in 2013 for top performing Normal (Academic students). Students enrolled in the PFP will skip their fifth year in secondary school and move directly into poly. Upon completion of the PFP, they will start on their full-time diploma courses as other poly-bound students. Najulah is also one of the 21 recipients of this year’s Model Student Award.