ColorScanner Wins Rep. Webster’s (FL-11) 2019 Congressional App Challenge

Rep. Daniel Webster has named a Citrus Springs student as the winner of the Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 11th district. Citrus High School’s William Jenkin submitted ColorScanner, an app that can take an image (either from the camera or a saved image) and pull the RGB color value and HEX value at any point on the image.

When asked why they were passionate about creating an app that identifies colors the student replied,“I enjoy working with graphic designs and making websites in my spare time. Many times I’ll have to screenshot an image on my computer, and open the editing settings just to manually adjust the color. I wanted to find an alternative and more efficient solution to this.” The student hopes to encourage other students to better their communities by using their computer science skills.  

Over 10,000 students registered for the 2019 Congressional App Challenge. These students created and submitted 2,177 functioning apps, marking the end of the most successful Congressional App Challenge to date. All told, 304 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 48 states, Puerto Rico, the Mariana Islands, and Washington, D.C.

The CAC is an 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. The non-profit Internet Education Foundation provides the CAC with supplemental staffing and support. In the five years of the Congressional App Challenge, the program has yielded 1134 App Challenges across 48 states. Thousands of functional apps have been created by over 25,000 students, and participant demographics surpass all industry diversity metrics.