GreenGuide wins Rep. Lori Trahan’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’s Third District

Rep. Lori Trahan has named Erin Kim from Phillips Academy as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’s Third District.

 

When asked what inspired the creation of GreenGuide, the student said, “As a passionate climate activist, I wanted to create an app that encourages users to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle and make a positive impact on their communities by supporting local businesses. Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and GreenGuide focuses on the importance of shifting our focus towards individual responsibility and behavior. Just by changing the seemingly insignificant choices each individual makes in daily life‚Äîsuch as switching their shopping habits to purchasing environmentally-friendly products‚Äîcan help mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, yet many people are reluctant to take action because climate change may initially seem too huge to tackle and hard to measure. Thus, I created GreenGuide, which addresses this issue by making it much easier for users to find sustainable options for various daily-life products and get a more accessible view of their positive impact on the environment. I am hoping that GreenGuide will increase tangible action for sustainability and serve as a platform for local businesses to prosper.”

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.