Environmental Service Tracker (Eco-Tracker) wins Rep. Matt Gaetz’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s First District
Rep. Matt Gaetz has named Ian Tsubooka, Nicholas Mistry, and James Hu from Pensacola High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s First District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Environmental Service Tracker (Eco-Tracker), the students said, “We were inspired by a group of International Baccalaureate (which is an international advanced curriculum program) students that created ManageBac, an online website that helps IB schools manage students with their IB progression. We recognized that more and more teens were using mobile applications while some of our local environmental organizations lacked a significant online presence, so we felt that implementing a mobile app would bridge this gap between the youth and service opportunities and encourage more teens to volunteer.”
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.