Coexist wins Rep. Jody Hice’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s 10th District
Rep. Jody Hice has named Viveka Mehrotra of North Oconee High School, Jack Rumpf of North Oconee High School, and Anyi Lin of North Oconee High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s 10th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Coexist, the students said, ”When one moves to a new town over or even across the country, one may struggle to find a church that feels as comfortable as their previous place of worship. Our team was inspired to create this app because of questions about finding a place of worship tailored to one’s religious preferences when moving to a new community being commonly posed among the people of our community in conversations and neighborhood discussion panels. This is where Coexist comes in. We noticed a lack of this resource and wanted to make the transition of finding one’s faith as easy as possible and accessible to everyone in a community. We were also inspired by the diverse beliefs and communities on the University of Georgia’s campus which is close to where we live. While our app is accessible to a larger area, we imagine our app to be a great resource for people who attend the University of Georgia from all over the country and even the world. We hope Coexist can match its users to places of worship and make moving to a new place just a bit more welcoming and convenient!”
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.