Quiznot wins Rep. Julia Brownley’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 26th District
Rep. Julia Brownley has named Alexander Sherbrooke, Hershraj Niranjani, and Ryan McCombs from The High School at Moorpark College as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 26th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Quiznot, the students said, “We have always found studying and retaining term/definition pairs to be time-consuming and boring. Throughout the lockdowns of the past year, it felt especially hard to focus on studying, with all the distractions around. So, we created Quiznot as a way to make learning fun and engaging. We wanted Quiznot to hook you into learning through a series of progressively challenging games. As we were developing the app, we found ourselves inspired by the idea of a “community of learning”, which could better help connect students and teachers. So, we developed a variety of features designed to help bridge the gap between class and home environments. We made it easy for students to take their educators’ term lists on the go, and to allow them to learn from anywhere. While Quiznot started as a way to make learning fun, it evolved into a fully-fledged learning platform that anyone can pick up and play.”
The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After eighteen months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the Congressional App Challenge came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for this year’s competition. All told, 340 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official 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. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and each winning team is invited to showcase their winning app to Congress during our annual #HouseOfCode festival. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from Omidyar Network, AWS, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.
The 2022 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2022, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.