LineApp wins Rep. Kevin Brady’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s Eighth District
Rep. Kevin Brady has named Zhuo Qi Chen, Ruihan Ma, Tiffany Ozols, and Henry Tudor of The Woodlands College Park High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s Eighth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of LineApp, the students said, “During the previous period of the COVID pandemic, our school was notified that we would be forced to close if we reached case numbers entering the Level 5 range. Our school was already at the Level 4 range, with hundreds of cases. We really wanted to keep our school open for our classmates and everyone at our school, and looked for a way to prevent the increase of cases. We noticed that the three thousand students at our school all type their student IDs into the same keypads during lunch, everyday, a significant transmission source. We wanted to block this transmission venue to prevent rising cases and school closure. Our group has always been really interested in innovative technology, especially touchless technology, and dreamed of bringing it to our school and community. Using our passion for innovative technology to help our school, we created LineApp to make our school lunch line touchless, increasing the convenience and speed of our school lunch line while cutting off a major transmission source and protecting our school from rising cases and closure. We hope that our app LineApp will help shield against the spread of diseases in the future and protect schools from the threat of closure as ours experienced, and create a faster, more convenient, and touchless experience for everyone in line.”
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.