Saratoga High School seniors develop fact-checking app

Aletheia wins 18th District’s Congressional App Challenge.

Saratoga High School seniors Grant Hough and Yanis Herne took first place in the 2023 Congressional App Challenge for the 18th Congressional District with their entry Aletheia. Honored earlier this month by Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo, the competition’s founding co-chair, Grant and Yanis competed against middle school and high school entries from throughout Eshoo’s 18th Congressional District.

Their app, Aletheia, is a real-time, browser-integrated fact-checker that allows users to validate news statements. While reading any article, users can highlight and right-click a passage to have Aletheia fact-check it. Aletheia’s research emulates the many steps that journalists would go through to fact-check a statement.

This is the second Congressional App Challenge honor for Grant Hough after coming in second last year with his SpeakEasy app, a personal digital writing assistant that detects potentially offensive content in real-time and suggests alternative wording that can be easily and instantly adopted into a user’s text.

Both Aletheia and SpeakEasy are available in the Chrome App Store.

Established by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2013, the Congressional App Challenge  is designed to promote innovation and engagement in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education fields. Apps are judged on the quality of the idea, including creativity and originality; implementation of the idea, including user experience and design; and demonstrated excellence of coding and programming skills.

Each winner of the Congressional App Challenge is invited to a #HouseofCode Capitol Hill reception, and their app will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol Building and on House.gov for a year. For more information, visit CongressionalAppChallenge.us.