OurVote wins Rep. Tom Malinowski’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Seventh District
Rep. Tom Malinowski has named Arya Vaidya from Bridgewater-Raritan Middle School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Seventh District.
When asked what inspired the creation of OurVote, the student said, “Last year in Social Studies, we were learning about how bills interact with the 3 branches of government and especially the legislative branch. I was interested and wanted to learn about more bills that are currently in Congress today. I looked on the app store, but I couldn’t find any that were any good. So I decided to solve the problem and create an app of my own. After searching for an API to satisfy my bill-searching needs, I got right to work and started. I hope this app will allow more people around the country to understand not only who their congressmen are but the initiatives that they support.”
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.