Mental Matter wins Rep. Larry Bucshon’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Indiana’s Eighth District
Rep. Larry Bucshon has named Blake Buckingham of South Vermillion Middle School, Avery Conner of South Vermillion Middle School, Catherine Adamson of South Vermillion Middle School, and Jaelyn Creasey of South Vermillion Middle School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Indiana’s Eighth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Mental Matter, the students said, ”We have many students in need of Mental Health assistance in our school. Our school counselor cannot possibly address all of the needs every day. We created an app that our counselor can use to check in with all students or a specific group of students she defines as potentially high risk. The app will include a form that will provide data for our counselor to track student progress. The app will also incentivize student checks ins and offer prizes to help students check in on a regular basis. The app will also provide helpful resources that students can utilize outside of school.”
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.