BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Two Boca Raton students received a big honor Friday for their work in computer science.
Congressman Ted Deutch announced Michael Yang and Xiangcheng Ji are district winners for the Congressional App Challenge. It's a coding competition to encourage students to use computer science skills.
The winners, who attend St. Andrew's School, created an app called Superpass to lock and unlock doors to classrooms, after discovering an issue at their school.
"Our robotics team was having a hard time signing in, signing sheets so we did the system to not only authorize people to come in but we can take attendance; like we said in the video, export that into a spreadsheet and that will be very helpful for our robotics team," Michael Yang said.
The students won a trip to Washington as well.
The House of Representatives has run the competition for the past five years.
Both Yang and Ji are first-year exchange students from China.
It only took them a few weeks to develop the Superpass app. They hope to continue working on it and possibly patent it someday. They also will receive $250 in Amazon Web Services credits.
They were surprised to win the competition.