Crowd CS Wins Rep. Cuellar’s (TX-28) 2019 Congressional App Challenge
Rep. Henry Cuellar has named a San Antonio student as the winner of the Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 28th district. Karen Wagner High School’s Ian Fernandez submitted Crowd CS, a trivia app that’s intended to educate users on several aspects of multiple programming languages in a fun and competitive way.
When asked why they were passionate about creating an app that explains coding the student replied,“I created this after noticing a need for something like this, it was interesting to see the passion that so many students had for code after participating in our local hack-a-thon. Many similar coding tutorial apps were outdated, and non-comprehensive. After this, I decided to create Crown CS.” The student hopes to encourage other students to better their communities by using their computer science skills.
Over 10,000 students registered for the 2019 Congressional App Challenge. These students created and submitted 2,177 functioning apps, marking the end of the most successful Congressional App Challenge to date. All told, 304 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 48 states, Puerto Rico, the Mariana Islands, and Washington, D.C.
The CAC is an 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. The non-profit Internet Education Foundation provides the CAC with supplemental staffing and support. In the five years of the Congressional App Challenge, the program has yielded 1134 App Challenges across 48 states. Thousands of functional apps have been created by over 25,000 students, and participant demographics surpass all industry diversity metrics.