Introduction

Lexington, MA has been known as "The Birthplace of American Liberty". A town with the tradition of celebrating Patriots’ Day and the year of 2021 marked its 246th celebration. However, Covid-19 isolated and limited public activities, making traditional Patriots’ Day celebration events impossible. In order to connect people, encourage people to enjoy more outdoor exercise, and continue on the Patriots’ Day celebration tradition, the Lexington Town of Celebrations Committee (TCC) was in dire need of support from people to come up with creative ways to celebrate. Our team, with mentor Dr. Wei Ding, had virtual meetings to brainstorm ideas on how to develop a fun, interactive, and meaningful virtual Patriots’ Day event for the public. Eventually the idea of "The Miles & Smiles" event was coming out.

What We Did

We created a virtual Patriot’s Day event! In our design, people could visit the brand new Patriots’ Day website created for this virtual event; they could take a tour of historic locations marked on an interactive map (Miles) physically and take pictures while they are walking and visiting (Smiles) in small groups. Additionally, they also could upload their trip pictures or the GPS maps of their routes to the website to participate in a fun contest for the best pictures and longest walk via public voting.

Impact On Community

Patriots’ Day Virtual Event was held between March 22 to April 19, 2021 with an amazing success!

Patriot Points Walk: Miles and Smiles website was successfully launched on March 22, 2021, four weeks before Patriots’ Day. Hundreds of people visited the website and it encouraged a large number of people to participate in the outdoor self-guided tour too. In the end, a total of 219 pictures were uploaded for fun competition. It’s gratifying knowing that our efforts helped improve the well-being of our community going forward.

Our biggest local newspaper Lexington Minuteman reported this event and highly praised our effort. “The COVID-19 virus did not prevent us from celebrating Patriots’ Day 2021. To provide the sophisticated computer work needed to create the map infrastructure, design the registration and voting system, and build in the system testing, our volunteer team of high school students had to start from scratch. This project was our most challenging one. Together with the knowledge we gained, we also instilled the spirit of volunteering, the importance of giving back to our community.”

Overall, we were all in this crisis together and were honored to be helpers! Our team did our part by learning new Computer Science skills and contributed to the common good; we’re proud of how we came together to keep our young people, our communities, and our democracies thriving.

Just like someone said, “Home is where the heart is. Whether it’s the town you grew up in or the town that captured your heart, we all want our community to be everything it can be. Not just for now. Forever.”