Job Foundation wins Rep. Ashley Hinson’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Iowa’s First District
Rep. Ashley Hinson has named Adrian Gomez, an 11th Grader at Waterloo Career Center, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Iowa’s First District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Job Foundation, the student said, ”The Job Foundation is an organization in the Cedar Valley that rewards students with money when they do well in school. This app will help them keep track of how the money awarded to students is spent as well as help students keep track of how much money they have available. I’m also currently taking programming classes so this was a great opportunity to learn more about programming languages for me. Since code.org is JavaScript, it was nice to be able to mess with a new programming language and learn more about it, since I’m mostly familiar with Python.”
The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent.
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, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.