Memolog wins Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Arizona’s Second District

Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick has named Erik Wisnom, Chris Allen, Ted Roberts, and Karl Ramus of The Gregory School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Arizona’s Second District.

When asked what inspired the creation of Memolog, the students said, “We, as students, have had to memorize many excerpts over the years. We decided to take our experience and create an app that could help younger students going through the same experiences. We talked to other students to collect data on how individuals memorized. We learned most students have a vaguely similar process that they developed across the years. We decided to synthesize these methods into a single, easy to use app that anyone can use.”

The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After eighteen months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the Congressional App Challenge came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for this year’s competition. All told, 340 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.

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, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.

The 2022 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2022, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.