Zubin’s Dungeon Quest wins Rep. David Schweikert’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Arizona’s Sixth District
Rep. David Schweikert has named Zubin Sidhu from BASIS Scottsdale as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Arizona’s Sixth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Zubin’s Dungeon Quest, the student said, “I observed that students including myself were spending a lot of time playing video games, yet there are practically no engrossing games offering educational value to students. Even for games with good educational content, students tend to lose interest in the game and all the effort spent in creating the educational content is lost. My objective was to think of a framework in which this rich educational content could be brought into any game and can be easily updated without putting this burden on the game makers. Game makers provide us with the hooks to bring the educational content into their games and use it to reward the players in their games.”
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.