Slideshow Karaoke wins Rep. Steve Chabot’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Ohio’s First District
Rep. Steve Chabot has named Zack Sargent and Max Hicks from Elder High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Ohio’s First District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Slideshow Karaoke, the students said, “The goal of this game is to get people more comfortable with public speaking. I’ve noticed that, in my time running our school’s programming and business club, a lot of the people who join are not naturally extroverted, so when the time comes to present key ideas or speak in an intimidating setting, they are often inclined to stay silent instead of sharing what they have to offer. That is the problem our project, Slideshow Karaoke, aims to solve. We want to provide an opportunity to talk to a crowd in a comfortable and relaxed setting so that our members feel more confident sharing their ideas in the future.”
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.