PA Cares wins Rep. Scott Perry’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Pennsylvania’s 10th District
Rep. Scott Perry has named Brandon Widjaja of Cumberland Valley high school, Jordan Tiday of Cumberland Valley High School, Ryan Clark of Cumberland Valley High School, and Cole Sherman of Cumberland Valley High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Pennsylvania’s 10th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of PA Cares, the students said, ”In this day and age, after covid, more people are back out into the world. However, this means that a lot of people are going to need help adjusting back to normal life. In addition, many kids and people are constantly looking for ways they can help around our community. With this information in mind, we recognized that sometimes finding volunteering opportunities and finding people to help out can be challenging. As a result,we simplified the process by creating an app, so that people can more easily connect and be aware of the volunteering opportunities near them.”
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.