Santa Rosa teen named winner in Congressional App Challenge

Helen Johansson, a first-grade teacher at Proctor Terrace Elementary School, was looking for an app to help students at the school learn their multiplication tables, but couldn’t find any she liked.

Her daughter, Mia, a 16-year-old junior at Santa Rosa High School, figured that was a great opportunity for her to stretch her programming muscles and get creative.

Her app, called Times Table Math, ended up being one of 123 winning apps created in the 2016 Congressional App Challenge.

More than 2,150 students nationally competed, with 650 original apps created and submitted from participating congressional districts. Johansson will head to Washington, D.C., in April for a ceremony and to receive a portion of the $50,000 prize money donated by Amazon for tools to help the winners continue creating apps.

When her family got the word that she’d won from Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, Mia was home on her free period.

“I was screaming in my room and then I sat on the floor and stared in the mirror for 15 minutes,” she said. “And I have a dream board, and that was on it, so I put a big check mark next to it.”

The app already has been downloaded more than 650 times from Apple’s App Store. It has been live since Sept. 29.

At Proctor Terrace, students in the third- and fourth-grade classes already are using it.

When students open the app up, they’re greeted by a maroon apple with “Times Table Math” on it, and a mint green “Play!” button.

Once in the app, users can select easy, intermediate or expert multiplication tables and check their progress against a graph. As they master more and more numbers, they’re awarded higher and higher levels of animals. The lowest level is a baby bear; the highest a dinosaur.

“I have no one in my life that is into computer science, so I don’t really know how I got interested in it,” said Johansson, a self-taught programmer who learned different coding languages through online coding schools like Codeacademy.

The idea behind the app challenge is to motivate students across the nation to get involved in programming and science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, skills. It is only open to high school students.

“I think it’s wildly important,” Thompson said. “Anytime you can put a challenge in front of kids, a challenge that they can respond to that gets them thinking, that gets them engaged, and in this case that benefits other people, it’s really important.

“I really could’ve used that app about 60 years ago,” he said.

Chuck McMinn, a Napa vintner with 25 years of work in Silicon Valley under his belt, acted as a judge in the competition.

“Mia had taken it all the way from a design idea ... to distribution on the App Store, through to being used by actual students in a real-world environment,” he said. “To me, it demonstrated not just a great idea or great coding skills, but the idea to turn a piece of code into a working product that had actual customers - to me that’s what differentiated her application.

“It ran the full gamut,” McMinn said.

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.