Check-In wins Rep. Joe Neguse’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Colorado’s Second District

Rep. Joe Neguse has named Sujal Dhakal of Fossil Ridge High School, Cooper Sipperly of Fossil Ridge High School, and Georgia Blakey of Fossil Ridge High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Colorado’s Second District.

 

 

When asked what inspired the creation of Check-In, the students said, ”In school, we saw a struggle with attendance in many classes, club meetings, and events. In classes, some teachers are unable to do their attendance in a quick and organized manner, therefore, having to spend large amounts of time from the class taking attendance. This also applied to club meetings and school events where a large majority of the time was spent getting attendance instead of actually presenting what needed to be said.

In general, it was a time waster. We saw a potential for an attendance app where the student submits their own attendance and the teacher does not have to spend their precious time doing attendance and can instead have more time to teach the class. Club meetings and events would significantly improve due to the efficiency of student-led attendance.

A couple of teachers recognized this problem and tried to make alternative solutions like using Google forms. Google forms, unfortunately, were never made to track the attendance of a school class and therefore lack in certain areas like preventing students from creating loopholes in a proper attendance. An app that can securely handle attendance with security measures, use a student-led attendance system to improve efficiency, and display neat and detailed attendance sheets is the solution to these problems. Luckily, that is what we have created.”

 

 

The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent. 


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, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.

The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.