3 Camas High School students win 2025 Congressional App Challenge

Three Camas High School students have won the 2025 Congressional App Challenge for the 3rd Congressional District.

Alyssa Wong, Chloe Luo and Liya Zhao developed CanScreen, an app that helps users screen for cancer and explore educational resources.

U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, selected winners for her district in the competition, an initiative by the U.S. House of Representatives that encourages middle and high school students to learn to code, explore computer science and build practical technology solutions for their communities.

The Camas trio said they were inspired to create the app to increase accessibility to cancer screenings, which they say bolsters a patient’s chance of receiving successful treatment.

All three have had someone close to them affected by cancer.

“Everybody has a story to tell, a personal connection about cancer,” Wong said. “Cancer screening is so important, but people don’t even know that they’re supposed to be getting this screening and that they’re eligible.”

The trio became friends in their freshman year through their math, science and technology program. From then on, between their busy schedules and weekends, they spent a year coding, designing and researching the app.

It took several iterations for them to reach their final product, which they submitted to the Congressional App Challenge panel in December.

More than 13,800 students from across the country submitted 4,600 original apps focused on real-world challenges ranging from health and accessibility to education, sustainability and civic engagement, according to a news release by the initiative.

As winners, Wong, Luo and Zhao have the opportunity to showcase their projects to Congress, staff and industry leaders in April on Capitol Hill.

“If even one more person gets cancer screening because of our app, it would mean so much to us, and all the late-night debugging will have been worth it,” Luo said.

The trio acknowledged their AP biology teacher Brianna Abraham and Banny Wong, Alyssa Wong’s dad, who is a gastroenterologist at Vancouver Clinic, for supporting them through the process and giving feedback on how to improve their app based on firsthand experience.

Aside from increasing accessibility to cancer screenings, they also wanted to raise awareness of risk factors. If they were to edit the app in the future, they would include more information on those risks.

For example, colorectal cancer is attributable to modifiable risk factors such as smoking, an unhealthy diet, high alcohol consumption, physical inactivity and excess body weight, and thus is potentially preventable, according to the American Cancer Society. Yet it is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in both men and women and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States.

“Our biggest hope is that CanScreen reminds people to take care of themselves,” Zhao said.

The trio hope to take a break from creating before possibly modifying CanScreen further or taking on their next endeavor. However, all three hope to pursue medicine, science, art or other STEM-related fields in the future.

“It has just been amazing to be able to research all of these different things, learn and apply it to real-world concepts and real-world examples,” Wong said. “Applying them to this app has been really exciting. I think STEM will be a really cool field, and I think all the skills that I learned from designing this app will kind of open future career aspects.”