TrackSmart wins Rep. Stephen Lynch’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’s Eighth District
Rep. Stephen Lynch has named Atina Lee, a 10th Grader at Canton High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’s Eighth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of TrackSmart, the student said, ”For myself, it is sometimes hard for me to keep track of things in my life as there are so many things happening. At first, I tried note apps to keep track of things such as water intake and inventory but gradually, it started to get unmotivating to fill in my water intake and inventory which led to it being very disorganized. As this happened I thought to myself what would make it more appealing to consistently keep track of things I needed. I started coding TrackSmart with colors and visuals I thought would be aesthetic and more engaging. I added visuals such as a water droplet to my water tracker so it would be more attractive instead of dull. With all of that, I feel people who were or are in the same situation as me would be more motivated with a more engaging app than a regular notes app.”
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.