Among the 30 Kansas Student Technology Leaders teams that scampered to Kansas State University last Wednesday were, for the first time, Manhattan High students.

MHS’s newest interest group, KSTL, tackled its first competition this year and came home with multiple wins. The group of eight competed in events from graphic design and website design to media and video production.

“I had previously done a multimedia kind of thing so I wanted to try something out of the box, something new,” sophomore Alex Lu. “I’ve done KSTL in the past so I knew about it and I think working with other people is a great thing. We designed a website where people can write things and post it so other peers can read and comment on it. To create [the projects], we had plenty of time except we procrastinated. We probably started two weeks before the competition and worked weekends and weekdays.

Despite started late, the web design team of sophomores Luann Jung, Leon Li, Isaiah Glymour and Lu took first.

“Each person can do what they’re good at and the project is done much better,” Glymour said. “[Web design is] a category that interests me. I’ve always liked working with code. [Our team] actually worked with code while others used third party website builders, so it was nice. It was a new language that I hadn’t really worked on before but we figured it out.”

Like Lu, sophomore Stephanie Fu has been in KSTL for a couple years now.

“I was told about it [KSTL] in sixth grade by my language arts teacher and I have been [in it] ever since,” Fu said.

Fu competed in both the graphic design and interactive media events, taking third in interactive media with partner Nolan Blankenau, junior.

“[We] created an Android app that maps out recycling bins and lets users insert certain points where bins are so other people can see them,” Fu said. “I’m really into technology. I want to be a software developer as a career so creating an Android app now is a stepping stone.”