DCSD Course Select wins Rep. Jason Crow’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Colorado’s Sixth District
Rep. Jason Crow has named Sujay Potlapelly and Advait Khanna from Rock Canyon High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Colorado’s Sixth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of DCSD Course Select, the students said, “We were inspired to create this app because our personal experience with registering for courses at schools in our district was time-consuming and inefficient and students deserved an easier way to select the courses for their school. We had a lot of trouble figuring out what classes we wanted to do and oftentimes had to go through large documents to figure out what credits we had finished. We, therefore, wanted a simple system that tracks all the courses and credits that we have completed so far. For these reasons, we wanted to create an app that simplifies the entire process.”
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.