ClassTranslate wins Rep. Vern Buchanan’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 16th District
Rep. Vern Buchanan has named Jace Billingsley, an Eighth Grader at Buffalo Creek Middle School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 16th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of ClassTranslate, the student said, ”At Buffalo Creek we have Ukrainian students that know barely any English, and we were having a hard time using popular translation services to communicate with them. After a few days of using these services, I came up with the idea with my parents and teacher to create an application to solve our problems, and so I did! One day while I was still working on the app, a popular translation service went offline on the school’s internet. Hearing this, I launched my app and was able to talk to him and tell him what he needed to do!”
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.