Focus City wins Rep. Ron Estes’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Kansas’s Fourth District
Rep. Ron Estes has named Lily DeHaven from Andover eCademy as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Kansas’s Fourth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Focus City, the student said, “My inspiration for this browser extension was my mom. My mom uses a focus timer so that she can be more productive but it was an app. I wanted to make a focus timer that she could access from her browser and still have functionality so she wouldn’t have the distractions of her phone.”
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.