For the third straight year, a team of Shady Side Academy Senior School students has won the Congressional App Challenge for SSA's congressional district.

U.S. Representative Conor Lamb (PA-17) recently announced that a team of two juniors from Shady Side Academy, Nick Zana and Zewei "Jason" Wu, are the winners of the 2019 Congressional App Challenge for Pennsylvania's 17th Congressional District for their math education app called Mathias. The app will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol for the next year, alongside winning apps from 304 districts nationwide.

The Mathias app can help students from elementary school math through high school calculus in solving difficult problems. Students can take a picture of a math question, and Mathias provides a step-by-step solution to help them understand the problem, while recommending and encouraging similar problems for practice to reinforce math skills. The app runs on the iOS system but is not currently available to the public.

When asked why they were passionate about creating a math app, the students said "Many students are intimidated by math, and give up before even trying. We want to encourage students, to make them not feel defeated."

Lamb hosted the Congressional App Challenge to give middle school and high school students in PA-17 an opportunity to practice coding and computer science skills.

"Congratulations to Nicholas and Jason for winning the Congressional App Challenge," said Lamb. "This challenge helps PA-17 students develop and show off their STEM skills, and I want to thank all of the teachers who encouraged students to participate. We have many talented students in our district, and I look forward to seeing the Mathias app displayed in the U.S. Capitol."

Zana has been a part of all three of SSA's Congressional App Challenge-winning teams. In 2018, he and two classmates won for an app that consolidates weather information to help with rocket launches (see story here). And in 2017, Zana was a member of a four-person SSA team that won for developing the SSA Student app that helps Senior School students manager their class schedules (see story here). Both previous wins came when SSA was part of U.S. Rep Mike Doyle's PA-14 district, before the PA congressional districts were redrawn to place SSA in PA-17 under Rep. Lamb.

The Congressional App Challenge is an initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. More than 10,000 students nationwide registered for the 2019 Congressional App Challenge and submitted 2,177 functioning apps.

Congratulations, Nick and Jason!