RoboConnect wins Rep. Mark Amodei’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Nevada’s Second District
Rep. Mark Amodei has named Aidan Schneider from The Davidson Academy of Nevada as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Nevada’s Second District.
When asked what inspired the creation of RoboConnect, the student said, “I’ve been deeply involved in FIRST Robotics for three years now and I’ve experienced firsthand the major positive impact of Nevada’s FIRST robotics teams on their students. FIRST Nevada students’ intern with NASA, conduct their own research at UNR, and win prestigious international awards as part of the greater FIRST organization, all while still in high school. However, I’ve also seen how difficult it is for Nevada teams to connect with one another and share their expertise to the benefit of the entire Nevada community. So I decided to program the solution, RoboConnect: a mobile application that enables Nevada’s robotics teams to learn about each other and network with one another in just seconds. By centralizing information on Nevada robotics teams and getting a conversation started between teams looking to collaborate, RoboConnect strengthens and helps grow Nevada’s youth robotics community and contributes to the emergence of our future teacher leaders.”
The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After eighteen months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the Congressional App Challenge came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for this year’s competition. All told, 340 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.
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, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.
The 2022 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2022, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.