Myndful wins Rep. Frank Pallone’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Sixth District
Rep. Frank Pallone has named Ashvin Trehan of Metuchen High School, Jared Wyetzner of Metuchen High School, and Siddharth Paul of Metuchen High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Sixth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Myndful, the students said, ”All three of us have either had personal or familial experiences with mental health. Understanding different mental health topics can be difficult since there are just so many resources that exist that aren’t written in accessible language. We are all part of our high school’s mental health club. In this club, we discuss ways to destigmatize mental health and ways to increase accessibility to mental health treatment in the school and in the community. One thing that we have constantly discussed is that mental health resources and treatment options exist, but they are often hard to access. For example, our high school’s mental health page is filled with pages of resources that may be helpful, but they are too hard to navigate and understand so they don’t end up helping anybody. We became determined to change this.”
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.