Movemento wins Rep. Janice Schakowsky’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s Ninth District
Rep. Janice Schakowsky has named Said Aydin from New Trier High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s Ninth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Movemento, the student said, “In a 2018 Statista survey, 35% of young women and 40% of young men were not politically involved because they felt their actions wouldn’t make a difference. The idea that youth aren’t knowledgeable enough or that it’s too hard to make a difference is a rhetoric that is dangerous to our democracies. I see my peers in school be discouraged from politics all the time because they don’t know how to get into effective political activism. Our representatives, fittingly, represent us. And considering that youth make up a big demographic of our society, they need to be able to have an easy and normalized way to reach their representatives. This can be achieved with Movemento.”
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.