Clima wins Rep. Jamie Raskin’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Maryland’s Eighth District
Rep. Jamie Raskin has named Brian Mason of Walt Whitman High School and Yixuan Li of Walt Whitman High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Maryland’s Eighth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Clima, the students said, “Both Yixuan and I had wanted to make an impact to help end climate change but did not know how to do so. After learning about the Congressional App Challenge, we decided that we would do our own research and create an app to educate others on how to best solve climate change. We learned that when tackling climate change, government actions are not enough. According to UN.org, “commitments made by governments to date fall far short of what is required [to uphold the Paris Agreement]”. In tandem with the government, people need to take action to solve climate change. However, many are already aware of this but are unsure of how they can make a difference. To solve this problem, we created an app that provides metrics on each action a user can take so they can measurably see the impact they created. We also provided pre-made paths a user can take to start reducing their carbon emissions. This will provide a means for users to begin helping the environment, and help them get over that first hump.”
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.