Seaside Service wins Rep. Joe Courtney’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Connecticut’s Second District
Rep. Joe Courtney has named Ryan Huang and Evan Lombardo from East Lyme High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Connecticut’s Second District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Seaside Service, the students said, “We are both members of the Shoreline Leo Club, a community service club, Ryan being the Vice President. We found that many people thought that events were often difficult or inconvenient to sign up for because this process was done on paper or by email, which can be confusing and difficult to keep track of. In order to combat this, we wanted to create a pocketable platform that can be used to sign up for service events at the touch of a button for everyone to use. As more and more things become rooted in our mobile devices, the ability to access community service should as well. We hope that this app will help make community service more convenient to find and encourage people to participate, improving our community as a whole.”
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.