ProtectEd wins Rep. Randy Weber’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 14th District
Rep. Weber has named Raeef Dean, a ninth grader at Clear Springs High School, as the winner of the 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 14th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of ProtectEd, the student said, “School shootings and mass shootings have become a common event. Being a student in a Texas school has never been scarier. While the officers on campus make me feel safer, I still worry about school shootings. Will they even get there on time? Could there be a faster alert system for a quicker response? Over the last few years, I have been exploring the world of artificial intelligence. I had been coding in Python for a solid three years and wanted to try something advanced. After discovering object detection frameworks, I decided to make my first A.I. system. As a kid, Lightning McQueen was my favorite cartoon character. Hence, my first A.I. program was a “Lightning McQueen” recognizer on YouTube videos. I ran my program over the final race scene from the movie Cars 1. It worked like a charm. Then the idea of school safety hit me. What if I could design a system to detect guns? Or maybe faces? Maybe I could detect how people were feeling. I decided to make a software that could do all of that and hopefully prevent more school shootings from happening in the future.”
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.