DeskHealth wins Rep. David Kustoff’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Tennessee’s Eighth District
Rep. David Kustoff has named Blake Freeman, a 10th Grader at Faith Heritage Christian Academy, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Tennessee’s Eighth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of DeskHealth, the student said, ”I have made multiple basic chrome extensions in the past. RabbitHole Detector was made during a 48 hour hackathon which trakced which pages you spent the most time on. I wanted to something with productivity, and I see chrome extensions as the most effective platform to use. They also updated their platform recently, and so I wanted to refresh my knowledge and become more familiar with the function available to me.”
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.