Pathway To College wins Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s Eighth District
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has named Morgan Lin and Skyler Lin from Saint Vincent Ferrer High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s Eighth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Pathway To College, the students said, “I was inspired to create this app because there is a lack of easy to use tools, or search engines to help college bound students. I was looking for a quick way to view what encompasses college readiness. There did not seem to be one site or brochure that provided me with a site map or view. My application would include that type of guidance, a quick one stop shop to all that is required for college readiness. Since we are like minded college bound students, we’ve searched up all the things that could and would help us in hopes of getting a head start. So why not just put all our research into this one application where kids like us can use at their fingertips?”
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.