Market Royale Wins Rep. Norcross’s (NJ-01) 2019 Congressional App Challenge

Rep. Donald Norcross has named two Haddonfield students as the winner of the Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s 1st district. Haddonfield Memorial High School’s Julian George and Pierre Yan submitted Market Royale, an app where players can act as stock traders, buying and selling stock on a virtual market with virtual money.

When asked why they were passionate about creating an app that allows its users to learn more about stocks and trades the students replied, “I’ve personally always had the idea to make a stock trading game, since investing has always appealed to me not only as a source of income, but as something fun. Then, we found out that there were some investing games that had similar ideas to ours, but two things differed. One, they were based on investment in real stocks, and were therefore much slower and more difficult. Two, they weren’t aimed for younger audiences, they mainly were for adults who worked in a financial field. So, there was definitely a demand for our idea. ” They hope to encourage other students to better their communities by using their computer science skills.  

Over 10,000 students registered for the 2019 Congressional App Challenge. These students created and submitted 2,177 functioning apps, marking the end of the most successful Congressional App Challenge to date. All told, 304 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 48 states, Puerto Rico, the Mariana Islands, and Washington, D.C.

The CAC is an initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. The non-profit Internet Education Foundation provides the CAC with supplemental staffing and support. In the five years of the Congressional App Challenge, the program has yielded 1134 App Challenges across 48 states. Thousands of functional apps have been created by over 25,000 students, and participant demographics surpass all industry diversity metrics.