Central Georgia News

Carrollton Junior High School issued the following announcement on Mar. 3. 

For the fourth consecutive year, a team of Carrollton High School students are among 274 other coding teams across the nation selected as winners in the 2021 Congressional App Challenge, an initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives to encourage middle and high school students to learn to code and consider pursuing careers in computer science.

Senior Leilani Linehan and juniors Will Nixon and Vanessa Phasavath invented an app called Trojan Fractions to help students with a fundamental fear of fractions that results from a frustrating understanding of the math concept in the early grades. They won the district contest sponsored by Rep. A. Drew Ferguson in Georgia’s Third District.

In the CHS students’ application, when asked what inspired the creation of Trojan Fractions, they wrote: “Even in high school, students struggle with fractions. We think some students don’t have the proper practice when it comes to fractions when they’re younger. With this reasoning we have come up with the idea of creating Trojan Fractions. Our app focuses on students who are just learning about fractions, because having a thorough understanding of how fractions work is the base of learning new things in math that involve fractions.”

The team said the value of the app is application in lower grades.

“We hope this app will help younger students in their current classes, but also be beneficial for them in their future by giving them practice at the start of their learning. We have been communicating with the teachers from the elementary school about how they teach fractions to their students. They gave us input about what kind of problems to use, what to avoid, and how to make this app encouraging for their students. The input we received from the teachers was really important through the process of creating Trojan Fractions to ensure the app is targeted for the right audience.”

The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After 18 months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the program came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for the 2021 competition. All told, 340 members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.

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, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.

“I’m extremely proud of their efforts and thrilled to see them get recognition for their work,” said Robby Blakemore, CHS computer science teacher. “Opportunities like this are great motivators.”

Blakemore said other CHS teams have created apps that are available for download for free. To get started, search Trojan CS Apps in your smart phone app store.

Original source can be found here.

Source: Carrollton Junior High School