Wild Blue wins Rep. Tom Malinowski’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Seventh District
Rep. Tom Malinowski has named Vibhuv Sharma of Montgomery High School and Vishnu Sharma of Montgomery High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Seventh District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Wild Blue, the students said, ”We were inspired to create the app because we realized that a lot of times, the things we hear about climate change don’t connect well with reality. Of course, everyone has heard that they need to recycle plastic water bottles, and that they should carpool as often as they can, but we often end up keeping this separate from our actions. This is largely because of the struggle to see how small actions affect the big picture. While it certainly is important for companies to act sustainably, individuals also contribute greatly to the world’s carbon footprint. By making this app, we hope to help users see that their small actions build up over time to create positive change.”
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.