MatheX wins Rep. Jared Huffman’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s Second District.
Rep. Jared Huffman has named Stefan Neuber, an 11th Grader at Windsor High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s Second District.
When asked what inspired the creation of MatheX, the student said, ”I have been passionate about creating software in the educational space for years now, ever since I first made and published an application to practice foreign languages back in 2017.
How I came to develop math training software specifically for elementary students was an unexpected coincidence. Five years ago I had just launched three educational applications that were using speech technology to improve the learning process. I was invited to present them at multiple events to a public audience. After one of my demonstrations, a man who was working in the training of elementary school teachers came up to me and told me that there was a great need for such a product for the most basic math skills.
After this conversation, I started looking into the research and discovered how essential a small number of fundamental skills were for a student’s understanding of every further concept in mathematics and for his further education and everyday life. But there seemed to be no timely methods to practice them. So I set out to build my own one…”
The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent.
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, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.