Milestone wins Rep. Robert Wittman’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s First District
Rep. Robert Wittman has named Joshua Markle, an 11th Grader at New Horizons Regional Education Center, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s First District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Milestone, the student said, ”After I had earned my learners permit to start driving, I learned that I needed to track my driving hours in order to get my driver’s license. Tracking hours on paper is inconvenient so I wanted to make an easy to use app that could do it for me.”
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.