Quillink wins Rep. Debbie Dingell’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Michigan’s 12th District
Rep. Debbie Dingell has named Anthony Varkey, Peter Schwendeman, and Aarnav Unadkat from Huron High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Michigan’s 12th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Quillink, the students said, “It can sometimes be difficult to get assistance and objective feedback on your writing, especially for people who aren’t students or don’t have very supportive teachers or peers. While brainstorming ideas for the challenge, this problem inspired us to create an app. We tried to solve this problem by providing an outlet for writers to connect safely and give feedback on each others’ work. Making writing assistance simple and fast was our inspiration.”
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.