An Evening Drive wins Rep. Matthew M. Rosendale Sr.’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Montana’s At-Large District
Rep. Matthew M. Rosendale Sr. has named Jesse Hruska from Capital High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Montana’s At-Large District.
When asked what inspired the creation of An Evening Drive, the student said, “I was inspired to create this app after I noticed my sister using her phone while driving. I told her that distracted driving is dangerous, but even after that she continued using her phone while driving. I wanted to create an app that could teach about driving safety and show the consequences of things such as distracted driving in a more interactive way. The method I decided on was to make my application centered around a story. My hope was that learning this way would make the lessons taught more memorable. By including legitimate facts and statistics on safe driving, my aim was to give a reason why it is important to drive safely.”
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.