We recently hosted an informational event on the Congressional App Challenge. This event featured two past Congressional App Challenge winners, Molly Budhiraja and Grace Hur, and a Create & Learn teacher, Mehreen.
The Congressional App Challenge is a yearly competition hosted by the U.S. Congress, where students in grades 6-12 create websites and apps that aim to address issues in their community. Winners are decided through each congressional district, and get an opportunity to showcase their app at the Capitol in D.C. Learn more about this competition on our page at our competitions page
The event started with an introduction to the challenge by giving an overview of its objectives, process, and eligibility. We then covered ways to decide on choosing a platform to build your app or website, and how to come up with possible issues in your community to address. Here are some highlights from each of the speakers.
Molly, pictured above, is a high school senior from Arizona and is a 2x winner of the Congressional App Challenge. For her project, Molly, inspired by the issues of rapid consumerism that face our planet, created an HTML platform where users can connect with each other to reuse children’s toys She emphasized the importance of your app not having to be perfect— instead, they look for your effort, problem-solving ideas, and engagement with your community. It should be a passion project that demonstrates your interests and commitment.
Grace, a high school student from Alabama, built a sign language translation app. She shared how her passion for theater sparked the idea to create a program that could translate a script into sign language videos that actors onstage could reference. She shared that the challenge isn’t necessarily judging your coding skills, but rather your thought and ideation process to reach your end result. She also shared some resources and platforms that she found particularly helpful, such as Google Apps Script, which allowed her to combine javascript, HTML, and CSS. It also has built in libraries, which makes it easier for first-time coders to build their apps.