CalendAIr wins Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 14th District

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has named Melissa Chowdhury, an 11th Grader at The Bronx High School of Science, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 14th District.

When asked what inspired the creation of CalendAIr, the student said, ”I have struggled with procrastination for as long as I can remember and I have seen almost all my classmates struggle with this same issue. One day I was browsing through my phone and I noticed that my school purchases a massive number of apps for us. However, I noticed that although All of these apps are amazing in providing resources for educational content, none of them target the foundation itself of a student’s education. We have resources for almost everything content-wise, but there is a great lack of resources for things like organization, procrastination, and mental health, all a crucial part of any student’s education. In order for a student to achieve their maximum potential, we need to address the roots of the problem, and there is a great need for these foundational resources, such as CalendAIr.”

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.