Rolling tyre app takes top honours in Scottish school challenge

Who said children don’t do anything worthwhile at school these days? News site dailyrecord.co.uk brings word that three Scottish school pupils have designed an app as part of the Arnold Clark Scottish Schools Challenge – and it is about to go on sale globally through Apple’s App Store. The app is called Free Wheelin’ and the central protagonist is a tyre, which players need to successfully roll down a track by tilting their smart phone.

This piece of tyre fun was created by Stuart Elliot, Ross Angus and Andrew McQuarrie and beat more than 700 entries from around 150 schools. For their efforts, the three pupils won a MacBook Pro laptop each and their school, Earlston High, has been awarded other computer equipment and the use of a minibus for two years.

“We are all really excited,” Stuart Elliot told the website. “It’s quite weird knowing that something we were involved in is being released globally as an app.” The app was developed together with Glasgow-based Chunk Games.

In true pupil fashion, the three boys only finished their idea the night before the deadline – even though ample time was available. “It was kind of like a light bulb moment and we all got very excited,” commented Andrew McQuarrie. “We sketched out the bare bones of it all but Ross stayed up all night to finish the story boards.”