Cherry Valley, Ark. – Each year, students from across the country submit their app ideas for their district’s Congressional App Challenge. Today, Congressman Rick Crawford announced that out of 33 applicants, a group of students from Cross County High School is the winner of the 2017 Congressional App Challenge for Arkansas’ 1st Congressional District. Isabella Guerrero, Anastacia Guerrero, Logan Turner, Caroline Ward, and their instructor, Jason Blake, created the ROA Calculator to assist individuals and companies who need to quickly calculate their return on assets.
Blake was contacted by a national corporation and was asked if students could create an app to help the corporation’s customers determine their return on assets. The students evaluated excel spreadsheets provided by the corporation that contained several cost variables in order to create the proper equation that would output the return on assets for each specific client.
“I am very impressed by the ROA Calculator app created by the students from Cross County High School. These individuals are incredibly talented and prove why STEM education is so important in providing value in today’s economic landscape. Their app will be able to help business owners and individuals,” said Congressman Rick Crawford.
This is the second year a group from Cross County High School has been selected as the winner of the Congressional App Challenge.
“Creating this app, students were able to work with a client to experience how their coding skills could be used to solve real problems and they were able to develop soft skills needed beyond the classroom,” said Jason Blake.
In Arkansas, there are 1,601 open computing jobs and there are only 328 computer science graduates in the state currently. Additionally, 71 percent of new STEM jobs involve computer science.
Contact:
James Arnold
(202) 679-4346
###