Touch the Cheese wins Rep. Barry Moore’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Alabama’s Second District
Rep. Moore has named Michael Constantine and Isaiah Poston of Tuscaloosa Academy as the winners of the 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Alabama’s Second District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Touch the Cheese, the students said, “We wanted to enter into the 2024 NASA App Development Challenge, which requires the creation of an app visualizing lunar terrain and containing many of the other major features of our app. We were originally introduced to the NASA competition and this competition by our computer science teacher. This would be our second year submitting an app to the NASA competition, and we have had a positive experience with it in the past. We chose to create a web-based application due to the ease of distributing such an application to the world, as the only installation required for a computer to use our app is a web browser. As the aerospace industry is essential to Alabama, we felt a special connection to NASA’s lunar exploration program, which also inspired us to create this app.”
This year’s Challenge saw an unprecedented level of participation, with 374 Members of the House of Representatives hosting competitions, surpassing the previous record of 340. A remarkable 11,334 students from across the United States competed in this year’s Challenge, marking an impressive increase of nearly 1,000 participants compared to the previous record set in 2019. The enthusiasm and creativity these students display is a testament to the growing interest in technology and signal a bright future for American innovation. The surge of ingenuity continued with a whopping 3,645 original applications flooding in, nearly a thousand more than the previous year’s high. This remarkable growth showcases the exceptional talent and innovation within our nation’s youth.
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. This resounding show of bipartisan support emphasizes the critical importance of STEM education in today’s rapidly evolving world. 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 2024 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May of 2024, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.