Congressional STEM Competition

This year, Congress is hosting the first ever Congressional Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Academic Competition.  It is also known as the “House STEM App Challenge”.  All Eighth Congressional District high school students are invited to participate in this landmark competition. 

Students from across the country will compete by designing and exhibiting their (wireframe) application for mobile, tablet, or computer device on the platform of their choice.  They must demonstrate their application with a YouTube video explaining how it works and what they learned over the course of the competition. 

To participate, create an account at www.challengepost.com and register for the House Student App Contest.  Submissions are accepted between February 1 and May 31, 2014.  The submitted applications will be judged by an appointed panel of individuals within the STEM education fields.  The winning student’s application will be featured on the U.S. House of Representatives’ website (www.House.gov), as well as on display in a U.S. Capitol exhibit. 

For the complete contest rules, click here.  For more information, and to register, click here.

Wireframe and App-Building Resources:

• https://gomockingbird.com
• Proto.io is free for a five screen project  http://proto.io/en/signup/
• FireFox Pencil is a free add-on:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pencil/

Resources for Students and Teachers:

• Code.org
• 36 Resources To Help You Teach Kids Programming
• CodeAcademy.COM self-taught courses in HTML/CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP
• MIT App Inventor tutorial to develop mobile apps on Android phones.
• Scratch a simple visual programming language
• Alice is used to create 3D animations
• Development Kits....Apple, Android and Windows

If you have further questions please contact Jacques Imperial at Jacques.Imperial@mail.house.gov or by calling our District Office at 425-677-7414.