Students from Wildwood Middle High School have won U.S. Rep. Daniel Webster’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 11th District.
A team that consisted of Esly Villeda, Jacob Sumner, and Andrea Fitzgerald won the competition with their app Flourish.
Flourish is an app designed for young people that are trying to navigate the real world. It complies important life skills into a digestible format backed up by reputable sources.
The students commented on their inspiration for the creation of Flourish was that “many teens, including us, aren’t actively being taught the skills that we featured on this app, so we feel like we are entering adulthood unprepared.”
“We know that these skills are necessary for life, and we wanted to make it easier for young adults to learn in an easier way,” the students added.
The Congressional App Challenge is an initiative where members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code.
Each participating member of Congress selects a winning app from the district, and each winning team is invited to showcase their winning app to Congress during the annual “#HouseOfCode festival”.
Travis Childs, computer science teacher at WMHS, commented on how he feels about his students winning this competition.
“I’m excited about the hard work that they put in, and I’m glad they took the things that we learned in class, and they didn’t just leave it at that.
“They applied it and added in their own thoughts and creativity to it”, he added.
The students are flying out to Washington D.C. for the Congressional App Challenge which takes place this week.
