Velox wins Rep. Chris Stewart’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Utah’s Second District

When asked what inspired the creation of Velox, the students said, ”We both had learned a lot of coding through online tutorials, and self-pursued projects outside of school. From our experience, we found great beginner tutorials online, but as we became more proficient at coding, we found these types of tutorials could be redundant when just wanting to learn a new language’s syntax, thus resorting to frequent, ad-hoc Google searches.

Learning a new programming language from the basics is like learning a new concept in mathematics – if you must start with basic arithmetic each time, you end up wasting a lot of time re-learning concepts you already know. This can be discouraging to new coders – of which the industry needs – who want to jump from language to language, and are instead forced to focus on one. While there are benefits to language specialization, the ability to jump from language to language is essential in modern industry, as many coding projects require more than one coding language. In fact, the University of the People, a tuition-free academic program, advises learning at least one new programming language a year.

Thus, we aimed to create a clean, straightforward tutorial application that could teach users syntax quickly, hence the name “Velox” – Latin for “quick.” Velox was designed specifically with extensibility in mind: as we learn more languages, we can add to the app’s curriculum database, making more languages accessible to a broader audience.”