Wishi wins Rep. David Scott’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s 13th District
Rep. David Scott has named Shriya Chakraborti of Elite Scholars Academy and Phillip Abraham of Elite Scholars Academy as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s 13th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Wishi, the students said, ”With the rise of the digital age, the way we communicate has shifted. Most socialization takes place online, with the new generation always on the screen. We get it. We are a part of it. Consequently, always being on technology has degraded our social skills, making us better at talking to people through a screen than face-to-face. While cutting out the online portion was an option, we founded Wishi as a marriage between the physical and digital social spaces.The purpose behind Wishi is to eliminate the awkwardness when meeting new people that follow us, and many other teens. Each of Wishi’s functions on Discord are built to be conversation starters for all types of people, whether you know them online or in-person. With just a simple game of Truth-or-Dare or solving riddles, you can get to know the people around you, bringing users closer together through the power of coding!”
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.