Color Deception wins Rep. Joe Wilson’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in South Carolina’s Second District
Rep. Joe Wilson has named Zora Stephens, a 12th Grader at Richland Two Institute of Innovation, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in South Carolina’s Second District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Color Deception, the student said, ”I was obsessed with the ‘Click the Color, not the Word’ game when I was younger. I later learned that the game is based on the Stroop effect, which is the delayed reaction when the color of the word does not match the name of the word. This really interested me so when I was brought the opportunity, I built the app.”
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.