Staff - May 6, 2025

Casie has been a local resident of Spearfish since 2011. She is the middle child of John and Jessica Dale. She's been homeschooled her whole life and always had an affinity for math and the sciences. When John began teaching her about coding, he knew she had a natural talent. Starting in 2016, Members of the U.S. House of Representatives host district-wide Congressional App Challenges for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. After John found out about the Congressional App Challenge (CAC) in 2021 he thought it would be an excellent homeschool assignment and he had both Casie and her older sister Katelyn enter as a team.

With John’s mentorship and both their parents' help, Katelyn and Casie designed an application called Bill List Discrepancy Locator. The app helps provide knowledge of city spending to citizens by finding discrepancies in the City of Speafish’s bill lists. And in fact, they ended up finding a $200 error, which was communicated to the city, and confirmed by their staff. This app gave the girls their first App Challenge win.

That year the winner’s event, #HouesOfCode, was supposed to be held in Washington DC but was moved to online. After attending the virtual event in spring of 2022, it would be less than a year before the Dale sisters would enter the competition once again.

Next fall, with the 2022 challenge deadline fast approaching, the girls began their work on the second app that they would enter. This one was called Lighthouse: A literary guide, and aimed at helping parents identify sources of good and bad content in books. It uses crowdsourcing to review reading material of all kinds. Put together in about a week, this entry would mark the girls’ second win. With the winners event for this year being held in person, the Dale’s set out and succeeded to fundraise the money needed to make the trip to Washington DC, so Katelyn and Casie could present their winning app in person at #HouseOfCode, a STEM festival held for the winners of the challenge from each congressional district. There they would demo their app in the Capitol building alongside hundreds of other students.

In 2023 Katelyn had graduated highschool and was not able to to enter the competition, so Casie had to enter by herself. With help from her dad, she began planning what her next entry would be. This time she designed Siren Shield: Wirelessly Activated Hail Protection. This app prototype listens for the tone A440, the same tone as the weather siren. When it identifies this tone it signals a motor to release a shield to protect property from hail damage and other inclement weather. Siren Shield would mark Casie’s first solo win. At this point she’s won the CAC three times back to back, on her own and as part of a team. She was invited to #HouseOfCode again, and just like the year before the family raised money and made the trip out to Washington so Casie could attend the winner’s event again. While at the event Congressman Dusty Johnson presented Casie with a Congressional coin of Excellence.

For Casie's last year of eligibility, 2024, she would code an app called RAWR: Realized Accumulated Wireless Radiation. The app creates a visual graph of how much radiation someone has absorbed compared to the safety standards. In the app you can change the standard to see how that would effect your exposure. Casie entered this app into the challenge and won once again. This would be Caise’s 4th win in a row. She was once again invited out to the winners even in DC but due to circumstances they decided not to attend the event. RAWR was Casie’s last entry before she graduated. Now her and her family are taking another look at their entries and focusing their efforts on raising money to launch the four apps in the real world. This new venture is called Apps 4 America, if you’d like, you can contribute to their GiveSendGo, and visit their website to read about Apps 4 America and there are more details on the four winning Congressional App Projects here.