SLTranslate wins Rep. David Price’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in North Carolina’s Fourth District
Rep. David Price has named Ganning Xu, Eric Liu, Jacob Van Meter, and Keshav Varadarajan of North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in North Carolina’s Fourth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of SLTranslate, the students said, “Approximately 600,000 people in the United States are classified as ‘deaf’, or suffering from hearing loss, and among those, 250,000 to 500,000 speak American Sign Language, or ASL. Yet, ASL isn’t often even offered as a course in most American schools. This makes it difficult for those people to interact and communicate with others in everyday situations such as ordering food from McDonalds, shopping for gifts at Target, and making conversations with those around you. As a result, SLTranslator was created. SLTranslator focuses on bridging the communication gap between those fluent in sign language and those who only speak English.”
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.