Party Games wins Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Pennsylvania’s Fifth District
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon has named Casper Stockman, a Ninth Grader at Strath Haven High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Pennsylvania’s Fifth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Party Games, the student said, ”The time was slowly ticking away, and I had at least checked my phone screen twice to see when I could get out of that get together. It was with a group of friends, but not a lot was happening. One of my friends started searching up “Most Likely To…” questions on his phone. If you aren’t familiar with the game, it is a list of prompts that you and your group then decide who is most fitted for that action (i.e. Most likely to..run for president). He played this game by scrolling through Google images with prompts on them, then later doing this same process but with Never Have I Ever. This sparked the idea of there being an app with every party game, in one spot. Then, not only could you avoid using google images questions, but it is also a one-stop shop, having every party game you would ever want to play.”
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.