Books2Go wins Rep. Frank Pallone’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Sixth District
Rep. Frank Pallone has named Raghav Herugu from High Tech High School and Vaibhav Herugu from Marlboro Memorial Middle School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Sixth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Books2Go, the students said, “Every year when school starts, my mom and other moms ask each other on various social media platforms if they have any books they don’t need anymore. Like grade level books, Cogat books, SAT books, etc. What we realized is that people have these books sitting on their bookshelves collecting dust right in our neighborhood that could be useful for us & others! That is when this idea came about. Why not build an app that could connect people who no longer have any use for such books with people who need them? Basically, we could act like a connector between the two.”
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.