Stress Scope wins Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Connecticut’s Third District
Rep. Rosa DeLauro has named Seokhyun Chin from Choate Rosemary Hall and Joanna Sohn from Keystone School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Connecticut’s Third District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Stress Scope, the student said, ”Our inspiration for the app was from personal experience of the sometimes socially and academically debilitating consequences of stress, including fatigue, nausea, lack of concentration, and emotional outbursts. After the pandemic, mental health has emerged as a significant theme. Last year, we performed an international research survey for high school students about the impacts of mental health from the pandemic. We realized that the pandemic had lingering effects on our peers all over the world, but most weren’t seeking help. In particular, stress is something that can be incessant that many remain uninformed about, particularly because of the stigma around mental illness. Thus, we wanted to create something that benefits not only ourselves or our peers but the broader population by providing effective yet accessible methods of measuring stress and resources to attenuate its compounding manifestations.”
The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent.
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, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.