At a gathering at the Entrepreneur’s Sandbox, Representative Ed Case unveiled the winners of his district's 2023 Congressional App Challenge. The victors were Jaylen Rabago from DreamHouse ‘Ewa Beach, a public charter school, Jeremiah So from Christian Academy, and Jinghao Li and Kekoa Dung from Island Pacific Academy.
The Congressional App Challenge is an annual contest held in each US Representative's district. Middle and high school students are invited to submit their original applications for a chance to receive congressional recognition and other potential prizes, as stated on the Congressional App Challenge website. Initiated in 2013, these projects primarily focus on STEM, coding, and computer science.
Rabago, a sophomore at DreamHouse ‘Ewa Beach who secured first place, developed the SpeakSafe app. "My app, SpeakSafe, aims to bring awareness to women's safety and help them feel empowered and secure in their daily lives," Rabago said. He further explained that the main feature of this app is a voice recording library designed to provide security by creating the illusion of an ongoing conversation which can deter potential attackers. Additionally, he mentioned that a 'panic' button enhances the app by instantly alerting loved ones of the user’s location when faced with dangerous situations.
So from Christian Academy clinched second place with his creation of an app called "Maui Fire." "My app encourages and spreads awareness to help the people of Maui through the tragic fire that happened not too long ago," So stated. He added that his app provides information about Maui itself and how to assist its people. It also includes some games for entertainment purposes.
Li and Dung, sophomores at Island Pacific Academy who shared third place, created PyQuCryptor. They described it as "a modern post-quantum encryption software written in Python 3.12 (compatible with 3.11) using the PyCryptoDome and HashLib cryptographic libraries." They further explained that it uses AES-256-CTR for encryption, PBKDF2-SHA3-256 for encryption key derivation, and SHA3-512 for integrity authentication and validation. The application is designed specifically for Windows 10 and 11 as Python 3.12 only supports those versions. They concluded by stating that their project is free and open-source software, licensed under the BSD 3-Clause No-Nuclear license.