AutoSort wins Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s Seventh District
Rep. Abigail Spanberger has named Vihaan Dutta from Deep Run High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s Seventh District.
When asked what inspired the creation of AutoSort, the student said, “During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the virtual school environment had resulted in many students and teachers I know to complain about dealing with numerous digital files. Some mentioned having hundreds of files of random file types scattered around their desktops. However, a few months before, I had started using Python again to work on different projects. I realized that I may be able to use the knowledge I have attained from those projects to create a program and solve this prevalent problem. Today, after countless hours of work and design, the idea has been brought to life under the name AutoSort.”
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.