HealthQuest wins Rep. Donald Payne’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s 10th District
Rep. Donald Payne has named Mena Filfil, Mark Vishnudatt, and Meret Filfil from William L. Dickinson High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s 10th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of HealthQuest, the students said, “Many patients, especially the elderly, suffer from keeping track of multiple medications and health goals at the same time. They often require a family member to remind them about taking their glucose medicine on time or going out for a walk that their doctor recommended. HealthQuest was created to help mitigate some of these problems and make it easier for patients to track their health goals. A clear example of this is Mark’s grandmother and Mena’s grandfather. They both suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure. As a result, they had to take multiple medications before every meal. Also, both of their doctors recommended that they exercise daily. Eventually, it became more challenging for them to remember every time to take the medication. HealthQuest offers solutions to these problems through our reminder feature, which will alert them whenever the task needs to be completed.”
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.