Apollo High School graduate Ben O’Bryan was recently recognized for earning third place in the district in the Congressional App Challenge last school year. O’Bryan developed an app called “Sign Away” that would help generate wristband call signs for coaches that would make it difficult for opponents to decipher the code for play calling.
O’Bryan was presented Wednesday with a certificate by Congressman Brett Guthrie, Representative Suzanne Miles and Representative Kyle Hubbard.
“My app helps coaches communicate to their team with secretive signs,” O’Bryan said. “It allows coaches to have more of an unbreakable kind of code just be saying a number that’s basically randomly generated.”
Guthrie said he was proud to present the to O’Bryan this week. The Congressional App Challenge was created to encourage middle school and high school students to learn how to code.
“He is a bright young man, and I was very impressed by his app ‘Sign Away.’ The Congressional App Challenge is a great way for students to practice their coding skills, and I encourage middle school and high school students to apply for this year’s competition. Congratulations again to Ben,” Guthrie said.
According to Jonathan Leohr, an AHS engineering and computer science teacher who also serves as school technology coordinator and VEX robotics coach, he wasn’t surprised to see O’Bryan earn high praise for his work.
“He is always working on little minor projects for me left and right,” Leohr said. “When he got the idea to do this, I said sure, run with it. I said you’re going to have to meet with the coach and work with them but I’ll help you when I can. We sat together several times here and there, but he really took off and ran with it. It’s really neat to see him actually get recognized for his work.”
Leohr said it was an independent project O’Bryan worked on specifically for the AHS softball team but it could also be used for any other sport that would like to have the ability to generate wristband call sign cards.
“Throughout this project, Ben utilized skills he acquired in our Engineering Academy and the AHS Code Pathway,” Leohr said.
O’Bryan said being in the program helped him decide on a career path.
“That program definitely gave me the foundation that I needed,” he said. “I didn’t even know that I wanted to do computer science before I joined the program. I knew that I wanted to do something STEM-related but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I really found a passion for it in (Leohr’s) classes. He made it really enjoyable.”
O’Bryan plans to attend The University of Alabama in Huntsville and major in computer science.
“They offer a lot of career experience before you actually graduate, which is very helpful for actually getting a job in the field,” he said. “A large portion of their students, if they do intern with a company, they end up getting hired within just a few weeks of graduating.”
