Ravel wins Rep. Maxwell Frost’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 10th District
Rep. Frost has named Keagan Bowman and Eoghan Riley of Timber Creek High School as the winners of the 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 10th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Ravel, the students said, “The inspiration for Ravel came from a number of sources. Most notably is an older version of an online judge that our programming team already uses. This program was written by a retired computer science teacher from our school and has been used by our team for a number of years. In part, we can contribute our past success in competitions to the older application.
However that application was – as mentioned – old. There were a number of issues, such as a confusing user interface, missing quality of life features, and broken buttons. Not to mention that this program was not built to be scalable – it could really only be used for our school.
So, after last year’s competitive programming season, we decided to take care of this problem for good. Ravel was built with students and teachers in mind in an attempt to bridge the gap of customizability, functionality, and simplicity.
Ravel was built to help both our programming team and the programming teams of others in our area. Since it was built with that functionality in mind, Ravel also supports individual classrooms, with private contests and problems, allowing teachers to fully tailor the experience to the needs of their students.”
This year’s Challenge saw an unprecedented level of participation, with 374 Members of the House of Representatives hosting competitions, surpassing the previous record of 340. A remarkable 11,334 students from across the United States competed in this year’s Challenge, marking an impressive increase of nearly 1,000 participants compared to the previous record set in 2019. The enthusiasm and creativity these students display is a testament to the growing interest in technology and signal a bright future for American innovation. The surge of ingenuity continued with a whopping 3,645 original applications flooding in, nearly a thousand more than the previous year’s high. This remarkable growth showcases the exceptional talent and innovation within our nation’s youth.
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. This resounding show of bipartisan support emphasizes the critical importance of STEM education in today’s rapidly evolving world. 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 2024 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May of 2024, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.