Trojan Fractions wins Rep. A. Drew Ferguson’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s Third District
Rep. A. Drew Ferguson has named Leilani Linehan, Vanessa Phasavath, and Will Nixon from Carrollton High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s Third District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Trojan Fractions, the students said, “Even in high school, students struggle with fractions. We think some students don’t have the proper practice when it comes to fractions when they’re younger. With this reasoning we have come up with the idea of creating Trojan Fractions. Our app focuses on students who are just learning about fractions, because having a thorough understanding of how fractions work is the base of learning new things in math that involve fractions. We hope this app will help younger students in their current classes, but also be beneficial for them in their future by giving them practice at the start of their learning. We have been communicating with the teachers from the elementary school about how they teach fractions to their students. They gave us input about what kind of problems to use, what to avoid, and how to make this app encouraging for their students. The input we received from the teachers was really important through the process of creating Trojan Fractions to ensure the app is targeted for the right audience.”
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.