Erika Pilpre wins Congressional App Challenge

After attending Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s panel discussion at San Mateo City Hall about Alzheimer’s disease in sixth grade, freshman Erika Pilpre felt inspired to create an app benefitting Alzheimer patients in the Congressional App Challenge.

With a purpose to inspire students to explore STEM, coding and computer science, the Congressional App Challenge is a contest in which participants are asked to create an app on any platform and then explain their design process in a video. The video is to be submitted onto a Google form, as members of Congress vote on their favorite app from each district.

As a staunch advocate for STEM education, Speier has participated in the App Challenge since 2015. She has student interns in her San Mateo district office assess the submissions and help her pick the winning app.

Pilpre won the Congressional App Challenge for the CA-14 district, represented by Speier. Her app is called Observe!! and was created free for iOS, with the main goal to prevent the onset and spread of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as helping people observe more in the world. The app is beneficial for everyone by increasing the speed in which a person’s brain can process information. It’s an attention-based game that shows the player a picture for five seconds, then asks them a series of questions about the picture with time constraints, forcing the player to pay attention to image details and to think quickly.

“The goal of the app is extremely relevant and designed to help others,” Speier said. “The design is very clean and user-friendly which is particularly important for people with memory problems.”

Pilpre’s preparations for creating her app started in her free time at the end of last school year and continued into the summer. She had previously started learning how to code in middle school as a member of the Girls Who Code club, but continued learning by taking a lesson about creating a quiz game app from a website called Udemy in the summer.

“I thought that this [course was] kind of similar to my app and what I wanted to do,” Pilpre said, “so I learned from there and then I kind of just pieced things together.”

Pilpre prepared for the competition by taking coding classes, design thinking classes and reading many entrepreneurship books, along with the help of her teachers and family.

“I even asked our family and friends to provide her with their feedback,” said Pilpre’s mother, Chiyome Hirose. “[It] helped improve her app.”
Not only has her family been advertising her app, but they have also been a part of the app-creating process. They assist her in coming up with ideas for questions, as well as help pick out photos to use.

“My family … they helped me with my app and inspired me,” Pilpre said. “I have a huge support basis and I’m really glad and lucky to have that.”

Pilpre faced many challenges when considering all the alterations that needed to be made to the app as she coded it.

“[Erika] was excited about coding and building the app,” Hirose said. “But [she] realized that there [was] a lot more to do to [before releasing] the app.”

Especially because it is an iOS app, one of the most difficult problems was to format all the images based on all the different screen sizes of a device such as a phone or tablet. Fixing the problem took significant patience and effort from Pilpre.

“It took me two weeks to figure it out,” Pilpre said.

Although the entire app took four months for Pilpre to create, the Congressional App Challenge is a way teenagers can use their time to express interests in computer science and coding.

“I appreciate how society in America encourages students to be creative,” Hirose said. “It was great to see [Erika] complete a project and get her app in the App Store.”

Through the Congressional App Challenge, Pilpre was able to further her interests in computer science, while also being able to contribute to her community in a meaningful way.

“I found it quite humbling that she was able to create something that complex,” Hirose said.

Speier recognizes Pilpre’s efforts.

“I applaud Erika for her empathy and public service,” Speier said. “I was very impressed with [her] technical and scientific knowledge.”

In April, Pilpre will have the opportunity to travel to Washington, D.C. to present her app at the #HouseofCode Demo Day Reception to Members of Congress and the tech community.

“I am very excited to meet other developers and to present my idea,” Pilpre said.

After her success in designing Observe!! Pilpre believes that she will continue a career in computer science.