Skin Doctor wins Rep. Ann Wagner’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Missouri’s Second District
Rep. Ann Wagner has named Saswat Tripathi from Parkway West High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Missouri’s Second District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Skin Doctor, the student said, “For a science fair I applied machine learning to image classification. I later realized that a simple problem domain where I can apply this image classification is for pictures of skin cancer, specifically a kind known as melanoma. I live in Missouri, where there are a large number of farmers who work on small farms. These people are exposed to the sun for long periods of time and as such may get melanoma. If diagnosed early, melanoma is completely treatable. However, late-stage melanoma can be fatal, as it grows down into the body’s limbic system and travels rapidly. As a result, a simple app can be an effective diagnostic tool, which is what inspired me to create Skin Doctor.”
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.