Healthy Minds wins Rep. Charlie Crist’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 13th District
Rep. Charlie Crist has named Trudy Kwok, Jenna Nguyen, and Gabriel Moreno from Pinellas Park High as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 13th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Healthy Minds, the students said, “During the COVID-19 pandemic, taking care of our mental health has become more important than ever and we strive to help everyone with our app to educate and encourage others on ways to do so.”
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.