Objective Green wins Rep. Joe Neguse’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Colorado’s Second District
Rep. Joe Neguse has named Aditya Nandyal from Peak to Peak Charter School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Colorado’s Second District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Objective Green, the student said, “I was inspired to create this app after watching ‘I am Greta’, a movie about Swedish environmental activist, Greta Thunberg. This film highlighted how Greta, at the age of 15, started a school strike, forcing her country’s leaders to take action. On top of that, she spoke in one of the most influential settings in the world, the UN’s Climate Action Summit. Before watching this movie, I was vaguely aware of climate change, but I did not know about its severity in the present day. Then, I did some research and learned that many states in the United States such as Florida, South Carolina, and New Jersey are in danger of being flooded by 2060. Initially, I was under the misconception that while climate change existed, we have hundreds of years to correct it. This is simply not true. I decided that like Greta, I wanted to make a difference and help fight climate change. Though coming to this realization was easy, figuring out a way to actually make a difference was incredibly difficult. Eventually, I began to ideate ways that I could tie climate activism to one of my other interest areas, coding. Like that, on August 30, 2021, I started working on this project and I am very proud of my finished product. I hope to soon publish my app on the App Store and release it to the public, finally being able to make a difference after having waited and working hard on it for so long.”
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.