Ripple wins Rep. Tony Cardenas’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 29th District
Rep. Tony Cardenas has named Lana Lim from Harvard Westlake High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 29th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Ripple, the student said, “The drought is a major problem in California and when I was initially researching it for school I was appalled at the severity. I hadn’t known the problem was that severe, and I wanted to make choices to conserve water on a daily basis. However, I found it difficult to remember to carry out these choices, and I wasn’t sure which choices were the most impactful. I had the idea that a daily check in could help incentivize me to make changes, and a calendar would help me track patterns in my behavior on a larger scale.”
The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After eighteen months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the Congressional App Challenge came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for this year’s competition. All told, 340 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and each winning team is invited to showcase their winning app to Congress during our annual #HouseOfCode festival. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from Omidyar Network, AWS, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.
The 2022 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2022, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.