Hollow Valley wins Rep. Peter Welch’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Vermont’s At-Large District
Rep. Peter Welch has named Jaden Parker, a 12th Grader at Champlain Valley Union High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Vermont’s At-Large District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Hollow Valley, the student said, ”I was introduced to HTML files and canvases during a computer programming class I took during the spring of 2022. For my final project I chose to create a simple game. The game I submitted for that class was used as a building off point for the app that I am submitting here.”
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.