Study Buddy wins Rep. Michael Guest’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Mississippi’s Third District

Rep. Michael Guest has named April Guo-Yue from Starkville High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Mississippi’s Third District.

 

When asked what inspired the creation of Study Buddy, the student said, “As a high-achieving student who loves making studying more efficient and effective and a Mississippi resident apart of the Mississippi Department of Education Student Advisory Council member with a love and passion for improving my community through increasing access to educational resources, I strived to use my computer programming skills to create an application program that would studying resources easier, accessible, and fun. And Study Buddy did just that!

To help better student learning and studying, Study Buddy’s functions allow for students to have access to inaccessible calculator functions needed in higher-level courses from costly calculators that many students are unable to have access to or afford. The Study Buddy calculator function also prevents cheating without learning because the calculator requires students to first finish the steps before using a calculator (determine which variables are needed, prior physics knowledge that does not require a calculator or computation), thus ensuring students are still practicing their physics analysis that does not require calculations.

Many students come from loud, difficult home environments that make studying difficult and quieter environments inaccessible. By using the Study Buddy soundscape page, students from such backgrounds can create a more focused environment by playing calming, focusing sounds to drown out their environment and further allow students to focus on their studying.

Study Buddy’s easy-to-use application can be used from any computer anywhere with wifi. By making an accessible app that helps students of all backgrounds further their education, I have found my passion for building projects to help bridge the educational inequality gap.”

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.