‘Imi loa wins Rep. Ed Case’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Hawaii’s First District
Rep. Ed Case has named Syreena Fortuno of DreamHouse Ewa Beach and Cabien Nelson of DreamHouse Ewa Beach as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Hawaii’s First District.
When asked what inspired the creation of ‘Imi loa, the students said, ”The inspiration for our app was wanting our home to be more represented in the media. Growing up many of us didn’t know about Hawaii’s challenges until middle school. We hope our app will make this knowledge accessible to the younger generation. We were also inspired by the winners from last year’s congressional app challenge. Their game was really cool and the fact that they came from our school made us feel confident that we too could accomplish what they did.”
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.