Rep. Colin Allred has named Tram Tran of North Dallas High School, Jocelyn Acosta of North Dallas High School, and Aurora Davila of North Dallas High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 32nd District.
North Dallas High School NAF students Tram, Jocelyn, and Aurora. Credit: @northdallas_naf
When asked what inspired the creation of Signism, the students said, ”Our inspiration in creating Signism is that in some high schools they don’t teach ASL in classes where most students that want to learn sign language don’t have the resources such as money to pay for private lessons. In spite of this, students or just about anyone can use our app since it has ways you can learn the alphabet in an easy and effective way to learn sign language. We also believed that since many people use Google for searching how one might sign a certain letter, we’ve noticed how time consuming it was and how it wasn’t very accurate at some points. With all these problems in mind we developed Signism in order to not just help students and people learn sign language, but influence the language to be learned and spread the word for deaf communities.”
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.
Watch a demo of the Signism App here.