BetterSelf wins Rep. Shontel Brown’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Ohio’s 11th District.
Rep. Shontel Brown has named Tyler Bordeaux, a 10th Grader at Shaker Heights High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Ohio’s 11th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of BetterSelf, the student said, ”Over the pandemic I became interested in learning about various philosophies. However, when I tried reading some of the texts I found them to be hard to comprehend and lengthy. This creates a barrier for people interested in bettering themselves through philosophy, which I feel should be accessible to those with limited time. I’ve always wanted to read nonfiction books, but rarely had the time to do so. This led to me consuming lots of summaries, in video and text form. I combined this summarization idea with bite-sized daily lessons to make BetterSelf an accessible and habit-forming way to learn philosophy.”
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.