Advocating for Animals wins Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 11th District
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis has named Sofia Toropova from Tottenville High School and Sabrina Trestin from Tottenville High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 11th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Advocating for Animals, the students said, “We wanted to make an educational game that was not only fun but also informative. We wanted to spread awareness and advocate for animals and their environments while combining our love for coding. We believe that advocating for animals is necessary because human actions directly impact animals whose environment is collapsing. ”
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.