Learn4Fun wins Rep. Lisa C. McClain’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Michigan’s 10th District

Rep. Lisa C. McClain has named Satchit Kulkarni, Lucas Walker, Joseph Tidrow, and Ehan Ahmed of Utica Center for Math, Science, and Technology as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Michigan’s 10th District.

When asked what inspired the creation of Learn4Fun, the students said, “This app was inspired through our own experiences in elementary school. We all had different apps/ modes of learning while we were in school, and we realized that those modes didn’t motivate us to pursue more learning. Those modes of studying led us to come up with an idea that could include learning and entertainment as a reward. Hence, we started building this app this summer for the app challenge. This app uses inspiration from other ideas and adds our own touch to the mix, creating an all-in-one experience for the user, without the need to access many apps for learning and entertainment.”

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.