Vital Fitness wins Rep. Carol Miller’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in West Virginia’s Third District
Rep. Carol Miller has named Brandon Simpson, a 12th Grader at Cabell Midland High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in West Virginia’s Third District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Vital Fitness, the student said, ”The Congressional app challenge was recommended to me by a friend who had competed in the challenge in the previous year. When actually creating this app I was inspired to create this app by my interest in both exercise and nutrition. As a member of a family who has a range of different abilities and mobilities I wanted to make sure my app design and exercise suggestions were mindful of this. I was interested in creating an app that can help people find information about exercise and diet that do not have the resources to do so on their own. The internet is filled with fad diets and ineffective exercises, so I wanted to make sure that my advice was based on information from research institutions. As a West Virginian I was inspired to incorporate information about the obesity and opioid crisis to help inform citizens of West Virginia of these crises and how to help avoid the effects of them.”
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.