Financedu wins Rep. Salud Carbajal’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 24th District
Rep. Carbajal has named Eamon Gordon, an 11th grader at Dos Pueblos High School, as the winner of the 2023 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 24th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Financedu, the student said, “My lifelong interest in finance began when I received an iPod Touch on my fourth birthday. I tapped an unfamiliar chart icon and was fascinated by the graphs and real-time changes, which I later discovered to be the Stocks app. Since then, I have followed financial news and the stock market daily, and my interest in finance has deepened as I’ve grown older.
But Financedu in its current form began on a summer morning in 2021 when I was completing an application for the 2021 Broadcom MASTERS National Science Fair. Inspired by an essay question that asked me to create a novel school course, I developed a series of personal finance resources and articles.
Although I created a course, I needed an interface that could deliver content to students, teachers, and parents. Using knowledge in web development gained through creating my first website dedicated to mineralogy, prospectorminerals.com, I developed financedu.org, an online platform dedicated to providing financial education for youth, free of charge.”
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.