Immigrant student uses language barrier as inspiration for award-winning app

WESTFIELD (WISH) — A Mexican-American student at Westfield High School is using his language barrier as inspiration for his now award-winning app.

Westfield High School student Liam Lloyd is an immigrant seeking to turn his life around after his grades started slipping. “I’m from Mexico. This is my first year here and my English was not very good,” Lloyd said.

He tried to schedule tutoring with teachers or students, but he wasn’t able to get the help he desperately needed. “I heard about a tutoring club so, I went there and I asked for help and it took the teacher about two weeks to find me a tutor and it was just a very hard process. It wasn’t efficient at all,” Lloyd said.

With no where else to turn, Lloyd created the app named Tutor Us that links National Honor Society (NHS) students at his school with students like him searching for tutors. At the school, there are 438 NHS students and a total of 2,600 students.

“You can select what year they are in, or what gender they are, but if not, you can just go search and all the possible tutors that are available for that class,” Lloyd said.

The project started out as a class assignment, but with help from his classmate Alexa Jimenez; his entrepreneurship teacher John Moore; and his mother, a programmer, it turned into something much bigger.

The students recently won $1,500 at a Westfield Chamber of Commerce luncheon for their work. Local businesses have served as sponsors to make the prize money possible. The students also took home first place in Indiana’s Innovate WithIN competition.

“First two trimesters, they worked on it every day in class in different aspects. Now we have a core, which is like a study hall four times a week and they are in here at least three to four times during core every week working on it,” Moore said.

“We’d be staying up late at night just texting each other like, ‘Hey, we need to get this done,’ and all that kind of stuff so, we’re just very relieved. We’re excited for what’s to come,” Jimenez said.

Now the school is looking at officially launching the app.

“For my own high school to be helping me into actually building a business and helping me and my future it feels good that they’re supporting me,” Lloyd said.

Liam says he hopes other schools will be interested in using his app in the future.