Emblitz wins Rep. Michael Turner’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Ohio’s 10th District

Emblitz wins Rep. Michael Turner’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Ohio’s 10th District.

When asked what inspired the creation of Emblitz, the students said, ”After spending an afternoon playing strategy-based board games, we came to enjoy the strategic and collaborative nature of it. Playing board games gives players the chance to connect with others, work together, and accomplish shared goals. We wanted to introduce these aspects to a virtual game that can be taken anywhere one might go. As a result, we sought to design a thought-provoking, multiplayer strategy game that can be enjoyed with both friends and with people around the world. Our goal was to create a strategy game that can be easily played and shared with people around you, regardless of what you’re doing. The fast-paced, multiplayer matches help achieve this by encouraging quick gameplay driven by teamwork and coordination. We also wanted to include competitive and additional reward elements to incentivize players to compete against each other and remain active and engaged users. Furthermore, we wanted the game to be as accessible as possible, so we decided to create a web-based game that can be run on any device. This is why we created Emblitz, and we hope that the nature of the game will encourage people to form new connections with those around them as they compete in a casual, friendly environment in a board-game-inspired strategy game.”

The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent. 


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, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.

The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.