You can read and hear many things about the Hungarian education system, nowadays mostly not so flattering things. But there are still some really curious and smart students who are able to achieve amazing results at serious national and international contests.

Recently, the Hungarian Association for Innovation sent two girls to the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). One of them, Karola Bálint developed a shopping application, and the other girl, Szilvia Király did stem cell research. They had to compete with 1700 talented young students but both of them had big success. Karola Bálint even received Oracle Academy’s special award for her app which means also $5000 (1.4 million HUF) for her.

Photo: Szilvia Király - index.hu

Karola Bálint’s mobile app called Shopmap, the users can display their own shopping list, and, at the supermarket, it tells users the shortest route to buy everything. How can it be possible? The app has to download the shop’s data and the place of the items chosen via internet and has to know the position of the user in the shop. Then it calculates the shortest route for each and every item chosen. The app works with a shopping list (or even without it) and it also stores previously made lists.

Photo: Karola Bálint - index.hu

19 year old Karola has since rewritten the programme, and it also has a new design. The app constantly has to refresh its database, and negotiations are still going on with bigger supermarkets, because only fictive stores have been used so far.

The other Hungarian contestant, Szilvia Király hasn’t even graduated yet: she is a third year student at Városmajori secondary school. Szilvia has had an interest in stem cells for a while now because her father died in leukaemia and after she first visited the Városmajor Stem Cell Laboratory in 2012, she decided to revisit the institute regularly. Nowadays, she visits the laboratory three or four times a week.

Szilvia’s research area is stem cell transplantation and, more precisely, how the patient’s stem cells can be transformed into other type of tissues: even skin cells can be transformed into stem cells, and then into other type of cells. Szilvia first learnt how to keep stem cells alive, and, half a year later, she joined a clinic’s research.

After a European contest, Szilvia’s goal shifted towards pharmaceutical research, and would use the frame she developed to test how a patient’s body would react to certain drugs. Each patient could receive individual care, and doctors could predict which drug would or would not work. Szilvia’s plans include testing drugs used in chemotherapy so patients could receive the best treatments for their needs.

We are sure that these girls will be among the most influential scientists in the future. Like and share our article if you agree with us! ;)