AI Golf Coach wins Rep. Pete Aguilar’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 31st District
Rep. Pete Aguilar has named Andy Yu, an 11th Grader at Los Osos High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 31st District.
When asked what inspired the creation of AI Golf Coach, the student said, ”My inspiration to create this app was my own interactions and experiences with my peers, as being a ranked golfer, I noticed that there was a major barrier to entry in the world of golf: coaching. Top tier coaching requires lots of money, time, and discipline to continue working on the specific techniques a coach gives in a player’s own practice time. Thus, I wanted to fuse my interests in artificial intelligence and my ability in coding to create a free application to act as an “on-the-go” coach that could compare the player’s swing with another player’s swing, such as a professional’s or a friend’s. In addition, I knew that the inability of a coach to travel with the ordinary golfer whenever they practiced was not realistic, and thus, by fitting various algorithms and artificial intelligence into a mobile app, the average beginner, intermediate, or advanced golfer could utilize this software to bring their golf swings and awareness to new heights! The end result was AI Golf Coach, an application that gives immediate feedback and spreads the game of golf by breaking through a critical barrier.”
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.