Local graduates place third in Congressional App Challenge

Jul. 1—Recent local high school graduates Alli Burgan, Matisse Dalton, Braxton Powers and Kyla Thomson were presented with certificates by U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie on Thursday at Apollo High School in recognition of their third third-place finish in the 2021 Congressional App Challenge.

The team, graduates from both Apollo and Daviess County high schools, created an app titled "Vocal" for the competition.

Known as an augmentative and alternative communication, or AAC app, the app is designed to improve communication capabilities for those with limited or no speech.

"It is truly an honor to have kids like this come through our program," instructor Jonathan Leohr said during the event. "These students I have had in class for three years. When you have them in class for three years, you really get to know them and their parents and their dogs. Especially with the COVID-19 years when we were in each others homes, and this group has been a little extra special for me just because of all we have gone through."

Guthrie's office has participated in the Congressional App Competition since 2019.

"We had 55 apps that were submitted, and this team placed third overall out of those 55 apps, so it is a very competitive program," said Kylie Foushee, a field representative for Guthrie's office.

Powers, an Apollo graduate, said he was inspired to create an ACC app because his mother, Kristen Powers, a speech pathologist for Daviess County Public Schools, was seeing a need for better ACC apps.

"A lot of the existing apps were either extremely expensive and ridiculous for what the app itself was, or the free ones that you could get were really incomplete," he said. "There wasn't a lot of consideration put into the voices that were used for it or the diversity of vocabulary that was used in the apps.

"We really wanted to expand on that and make it more accessible."

Thomson said she felt that a lot of the existing apps lacked a human element, which was something the team wanted to incorporate into their app.

"The main reason I wanted to do this app is because when most people use ACC apps, usually it is a human-robot conversation, it is not a human and human interaction," she said. "I wanted to be able to give somebody the opportunity where it is a human and human interaction."

Powers said one of the most difficult elements of designing the Voice app was determining how many symbols they could fit onto a screen. Each symbol represents a word that when touched is heard as a spoken word through a phone's speaker.

"The thing that we spent the most time on was designing a layout and how many buttons we could fit on one screen and how expansive of a vocabulary we could fit into one screen," he said. "I feel like narrowing that down was one of the most difficult things we experienced."