StudyCoordinator wins Rep. Grace Meng’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s Sixth District
Rep. Grace Meng has named Nickolas Koe from Townsend Harris High School (Q525) as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s Sixth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of StudyCoordinator, the student said, “During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself buried under a pile of home and class work, much of which was on the brink of being late. I decided to make a Trello list to try to organize myself, and keeping track of things became multitudes easier. However, I found that creating these cards myself was a bit tedious. I had planned to build an app to create trello cards in a similar way this app works, but lost interest once summer started. This year, I heard about the app competition, and remembered that idea. I also found myself especially distracted by youtube and other distractions this year, and found that having designated study/work and break times helped – so I added it to my app. Ultimately, my main goal behind this app is to help me and other students organize and focus on schoolwork.”
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.