Hoboken Girl Scouts develop walking tour app

A Hudson County Girl Scout troop can add app development to its long list of achievements.
Troop 120-41 created a walking tour smartphone app that helps people discover the city of Hoboken. The app features 60 historical and memorial sites around the city that are divided into themes. Each of the tours take anywhere from 1 hour to 90 minutes.
The girls say that they learned about local history and landmarks that they didn’t even know existed.
Scouts Alison Fung, Celia Malba and Greta Weisz are all 14 years old. They researched the points of interest for the app with help from the Hoboken Historical Society. They say that they spent about 50 hours taking hundreds of photographs. They also recorded GPS coordinates for a live map on the app.
A parent helped to write some of the computer code.
The project is part of their Silver Award Project – a project to help improve the scouts’ community. Fung says that she got the idea for the app after taking a walking tour in France.
“The walking tour was amazing, and I was thinking this would be a great project for Hoboken because there is a lot of hidden Easter eggs that people don't really know about,” she says.
The app includes locations like restaurants, parks and historical buildings. The girls even updated the app on the day that the new 9/11 memorial opened at Pier A Park.
“I feel like we've done our community a good service by helping people learn about their local history,” Fung says.
The free app launched in November and has a 5-star rating in the iTunes App store