The Cyber Adventure wins Rep. Donald McEachin’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s Fourth District
Rep. Donald McEachin has named Reagan Duffy and Michael Beauchamp from Catholic High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s Fourth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of The Cyber Adventure, the students said, “We were inspired to create this app based upon our participation in the National CyberPatriot youth cybersecurity education program and our school’s cybersecurity club, where we learned important skills about how to be good cyber citizens and keeping the online environment safe for others. Knowing that today’s society is relying more on digital resources, we thought it would be a good idea to create an app that would educate young children on safe cyber practices in a fun way, so it would not bore them by being too formal.”
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.