timely wins Rep. Rick Allen’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s 12th District
Rep. Rick Allen has named Amber Verma of Lakeside High School, Aditi Umapathy of Lakeside High School, and Joseph Alackara of Lakeside High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s 12th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of timely, the students said, ”All three of us have close family members that suffer from ADHD and other similar attention span disorders. At a young age, we watched them struggle with starting and completing tasks on time in addition to hyper focusing and being unable to manage time appropriately. Therefore, we were inspired to develop a user-friendly yet aesthetic design that would allow our family and others constrained by the educational barriers of being an ADHD student to form a better sense of time management, a skillset highly valued in today’s world. We made sure to carefully choose everything down to the details, such as the colors and icons being made simplistic to make accessibility as easy as possible so that our app can reach the widest audience it possibly can.”
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.