Idealize wins Rep. Alexander Mooney’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in West Virginia’s Second District
Rep. Alexander Mooney has named Mariam Kisto of George Washington High School, William Matheny of Ripley High School, Caleb Newell of Homeschooled, and Chase Steorts of Hurricane High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in West Virginia’s Second District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Idealize, the students said, ”What inspired us to create Idealize is that while we were trying to come up with an idea for an app, we thought about what if there was a platform that gave you ideas on what sort of app you should create. This simple thought led us to asking ourselves, why don’t we code such an app? This allowed us to create the app and have a platform where users can give ideas that they think would be cool and for someone, who is capable of doing so, to bring the idea to life.”
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.