RoboMaze wins Rep. Lucy McBath’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s Sixth District
Rep. Lucy McBath has named Austin Song and John Song from Johns Creek High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s Sixth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of RoboMaze, the students said, “We were originally inspired to create RoboMaze after learning about the situation in California. One of our family friends along with thousands of other Americans were forced to evacuate due to a wildfire. The frequent wildfires and the impact they have on the lives of many people is a serious problem. Under certain fire-related scenarios, entering the sites of these accidents may be extremely risky as the original structure of the building may already be altered. This may make it difficult for first responders to locate the trapped citizens and adds unnecessary risk to firefighters entering these buildings. We created RoboMaze with the idea that robots may assist in using AI navigation to combat these problems.”
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.