Move to West Virginia wins Rep. David McKinley’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in West Virginia’s First District
Rep. David McKinley has named Shawn Li from Morgantown High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in West Virginia’s First District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Move to West Virginia, the student said, “I was inspired to create this app after hearing about a remote worker on Facebook asking for help with choosing the best city in West Virginia to move to. West Virginia’s population has been steadily decreasing over time, along with its local businesses and industry. Remote workers are a perfect fit to move to West Virginia; they won’t have the trouble of finding work opportunities and can enjoy West Virginia’s wildlife and outdoor aspects, while enjoying benefits such as a lower property tax rate, lower rent, and the more suburban/rural feel. I felt helping remote workers move to West Virginia would be helpful to both the remote workers themselves and West Virginia as a state‚ through paying taxes and supporting local businesses.”
The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After eighteen months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the Congressional App Challenge came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for this year’s competition. All told, 340 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.
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, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.
The 2022 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2022, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.