Megaphone wins Rep. Ted Lieu’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 33rd District
Rep. Ted Lieu has named Angelina Tsuboi and Cooper Saye from Chadwick School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 33rd District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Megaphone, the students said, “While attending classes at Chadwick, we encountered a variety of issues such as unanswered questions at the end of class, incompatible schedules to get from teachers on important assignments, random/unnecessary emails for promoting events and clubs, and a lack of a platform to post announcements to specific students at Chadwick. The Chadwick computer science department previously used a software called ‘Piazza’, but it was not easy to use due to its poor user interface and lack of teacher feedback. Furthermore, other departments at Chadwick such as math, science, sports, and art don’t have a software platform where students can get answers to questions, contact teachers directly, and make announcements. In order to solve these problems, we created Megaphone to regulate announcements, contact teachers and peers about any related topics, and to help resolve any questions students may have within different communities at Chadwick.”e
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.