Congressman Ratcliffe recognizes Congressional App Challenge winner

(ROCKWALL, TX – Dec. 16, 2016) Congressman John Ratcliffe recognized Greenville homeschool student Kaylee Kimbrough yesterday as the winner of the 2016 Congressional App Challenge for Texas’ 4th District.

Ratcliffe signed a certificate at the Rockwall District Office (6531 Horizon Road, Suite A) in honor of Kaylee and her winning app “A2B”— a Google Maps-based game where players use the arrow keys to navigate from one landmark to another, advancing to the next level after reaching “Point B.”

“It’s really encouraging,” said Kaylee about winning the contest. “It’s nice to know that Congressman Ratcliffe and people in this area are supporting young people pursuing computer science, and especially young women pursuing computer science.”

The Congressional App Challenge is a prestigious competition which engages students’ creativity and encourages their participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education fields. High school students in each congressional district across the country are invited to compete by creating and exhibiting their software application, or “app,” for mobile, tablet, or computer devices on a platform of their choice.

“I love these congressional challenges because it gives me an opportunity to meet folks like Kaylee,” Ratcliffe said. “I would love to see coding become part of the regular curriculum for young men and women in high school. That sort of ties into my interests in seeing a cyber workforce better developed in this country. But this is a great start, to have a contest like this that identifies and highlights it.”

Kaylee created the app with the help of fellow students Cristina Contreras and Emily Chang, who she met through a free eight-week summer program for rising female high school juniors and seniors to learn how to code called Girls Who Code.

“We saw that ourselves and a lot of our peers didn’t really know how to navigate well, and using a navigation app while driving is a distraction. So that’s the problem we were trying to address,” Kaylee said.

While Emily had taken computer programming classes before, Kaylee and Cristina didn’t have much experience with programming prior to taking part in Girls Who Code. Kaylee said applying everything she learned through the program to create the app was one of the more difficult things about the project, but seeing the finished product at the end made it all worthwhile.

“The most fun part about creating the app was seeing the end result and how the effort that we put into it paid off,” Kaylee said. “When you’re working with a coding challenge it can take a really long time to pin down what your bug is or your problem is, and then you finally see what you had envisioned in your head created. Knowing that you made it – that’s a good sense of accomplishment.”

Kaylee said although the app isn’t currently available to the public, she would soon like to see it made accessible for everyone to enjoy.

“It’s a desktop game, so you play it on your computer. We haven’t gotten a web host or anything so it’s not available to the public yet, but we’d like to do that soon,” she said.

Kaylee said she had so much fun with the Girls Who Code program that she expressed an interest in studying computer science at the University of Texas in Austin once she graduates high school.

“I would definitely like to work on my own apps and participate in a hackathon or something like that,” she said.

Watch Kaylee, Cristina and Emily give a pitch about their “A2B” app at the Girls Who Code Round Rock graduation here: youtube.com/watch?v=y4-VwgCOrL4.

For more info about the Congressional App Challenge visit congressionalappchallenge.us/2016-winners/.

Story and photo by Austin Wells, Blue Ribbon News.