An Anecdote of Continued Human Computation
A Bit of Hope in the Youth Following the Congressional App Challenge
I’ve been wanting to post something a bit more positive lately, and I think this fits the bill. A few weeks ago, I had the distinct pleasure of being a volunteer judge for the Congressional App Challenge in the Congressional district I grew up in, MD-06. I enjoy teaching and grading so this sort of work was right up my alley.
I’ll level with you—my base expectations were very low going into judging, simply because I expected a proliferation of AI slop and very few genuine stabs at a decently-made app. And I’m excited to tell you how happy I am that I was too cynical going into that process. We judges had a solid rubric, and I provided my freeform feedback in three stages: concept, functionality, and design. I judged 12 different proposals, and I’ll summarize my findings.
Sometimes, even for those with an entrepreneurial spirit, it can feel like everything has already been created. It's an unreasonably high bar to clear, to think of something no one else has brought to market, especially for a high school student who almost certainly doesn't have the resources to realize that idea. This might be obvious for the older folks, but I found the students often trying to justify their work by these sort of unreasonable metrics. To many of the groups I simply stressed, “Your idea is good, don't worry in that regard. Just focus on explaining what gap your idea fills or how your idea outperforms existing ideas.” Besides the seeming lack of self-confidence, I am glad to report that these students’ ideas were largely original and unique, and founded in problems they had that they wanted to solve (which is the perfect sort of problem for this sort of endeavor). It was refreshing reading these young viewpoints, largely untainted by pressures of the modern tech market and unbothered with nearly everything except passion and interest in their projects, which is exactly what I would look for here.
It is important to note that the projects submitted for the Challenge are largely small, so app functionality is often quite limited. That and students are no doubt quite new to the process. So the important thing then is that the foundation is in place; that is, the proposal must ensure that basic functionality exists (buttons work, etc.), that the scope of the idea is addressed (does your app appropriately encapsulate your idea), and that any natural questions are tackled in an appropriate fashion (what’s coming next, etc.). I was genuinely surprised at how well most of these apps worked.
Perhaps the thing that astounded me the most was the level of care and detail that went into the UI/UX1 work. One entry in particular had better graphical design than what I’ve seen come out of super-senior industry professionals (talking 15+ years of experience, and better than my own skills in that regard, certainly). And that brings me hope, that high school students can exhibit that level of polish despite their overwhelming lack of experience in the field.
So I must say at the end of this that while I still have genuine concerns about the state of education and learning (especially in the United Sttates given the trends of the past few decades and the allure of faster results through AI), I’m a bit less cynical. The most fundamental part of learning and engaging with computer science (and related topics) is in logical reasoning: assuming that that criterion is fulfilled, the rest will eventually fall into place. And I saw surprisingly few groups and individuals taking the shortcuts that would skip learning that logical reasoning. Anecdotally, for this small window, at the very least, these students largely seem to be engaging how they should to sustain their own learning in these spaces. That spirit and drive is a glimmer of hope to hold on to, to emphasize and encourage in other students.
User Interface/User Experience, essentially the graphical and interactive functionality of the app