Model Masters wins Rep. Dan Bishop’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in North Carolina’s Ninth District
Rep. Dan Bishop has named Aidan O’Bryan, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in North Carolina’s Ninth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Model Masters, the student said, ”I was motivated to create this website because I wanted a place for me and my friends (who were all interested in model building) to share our work with each other in a permanent, structured way. Sharing a bunch of photos over text can get messy, and using an existing social media platform wasn’t going to cut it because I wanted it to have custom features specifically for models, as well as a community who was passionate about the same thing. In terms of existing applications that inspired me, I liked the feel of user-friendly sites such as Facebook, which is why I made all of the elements rounded and warm colored. I had also seen someone looking to buy a car on a website that I can’t remember the name of now, but it had used the color red a lot, which reminded me of the red spray paint often used in model construction.”
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.