Guardian wins Rep. Robert Wittman’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s First District

Rep. Robert Wittman has named Christian Franklin from Gloucester High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s First District.

When asked what inspired the creation of Guardian, the student said, “The idea for this app came from watching Scammer Payback and Trilogy Media on YouTube. I would watch technology being used to take advantage of people, especially the elder population, and it sickened me. In admiration of what these channels do, I also wanted to find a way that could assist people in avoiding these scams/frauds. At the same time, I was learning iOS design with Swift, an insanely powerful programming language, and I was taking a Cyber Security class. Combined with the knowledge and skills from both, the idea for Guardian came to light.”

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.