About the winners...

Katelyn and Casie Dale have always been homeschooled, attending Spearfish Middle School for a brief time to participate in the school's band and choir classes. As homeschoolers, opportunities like the App Challenge offer an opportunity to showcase their skills and participate in a program outside of the school setting.

The first victory came in 2021 after the duo created “Bill List Discrepancy Locator,” a project to analyze the city's Bill List. They found a $324 inconsistency in $112,160,190.07 worth of invoices paid to vendors from 2013-2020, a 0.00029% error that was confirmed with the City of Spearfish. Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 crisis that year, the winners event in Washington D.C. was cancelled.

The second victory came in 2022 with an application called, “Lighthouse.” The two girls are regular patrons of the Grace Balloch Memorial Library. Their father, John Dale, while studying Philosophy at The University of Arizona in the late 1990's learned how brains become reconfigured based on what is received through the senses. By reading certain material we might change who we are or who we will be in the future. That is why they created Lighthouse, an information system to help a community work together to identify sources of good and bad content in the books at the library.

The Dale family raised the funds locally to make the trip to Washington D.C. in Spring 2023 where they attended #HouseOfCode and celebrated their back to back victories at the capital.

The third victory came in December 2023 with a project called, “Siren Shield.” After Katelyn's graduation earlier in the year, Casie, the Dale family's middle daughter, did the project alone. In the Summer of 2020, three inch hailstones destroyed their front windows and ruined their garden, but also provided inspiration for Casie's project. Siren Shield listens for the special tone from the City of Spearfish's Tornado alert sirens, then deploys garden and window shielding to protect them from damage. The project was implemented as a scale model, but the judges appreciated the real-world applicability of the project and awarded the Dale's home school with their third consecutive win in the competition.

The Dale family once again raised money to help get Casie to the event in Washington, DC and represent South Dakota at the capital. #HouseOfCode provides a unique opportunity to network with industry leaders in tech, showcase their skills, and learn from other talented students in coding. They were successful with the community's support to take advantage of this amazing opportunity.

The last and fourth victory was RAWR for Casie's 2024 entry. RAWR stands for Realized Accumulated Wireless Radiation. The app allows its users to visualize the radiation coming from our phones, computers, and cell towers. Radio Frequencies are the signals that those devices use to send data and sense the environment. They are invisible and often hard to detect. The app adds up the accumulated radiation and displays it in a bar graph. The max on the graph is based on a variable that represents the current safety standard, it can be adjusted by the user to show what the RAWR would be at different standards.