Trackie – School Bus Tracker wins Rep. Christopher Smith’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Fourth District

Rep. Christopher Smith has named Aditya Choudhary from Manalapan-Englishtown Middle School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Fourth District.

 

When asked what inspired the creation of Trackie – School Bus Tracker, the student said, “I was always thinking about why my school bus does not use any app to let me know when the school bus is going to come to my bus stop. The need for such an app becomes stronger when it is a cold windy day or raining. In those times, even keeping track of when the bus came on previous days becomes challenging. I searched online and found no school bus tracker that worked without the school bus using it. So in the COVID-19 time, I decided to learn to code and fix this problem for myself and the community.”

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.