College Calculator wins Rep. August Pfluger’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 11th District
Rep. August Pfluger has named Raj Sukumar, a 12th Grader at Trinity School of Midland, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 11th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of College Calculator, the student said, ”During my junior year, my school’s college advisor joked around with me during my computer science class. He said that I should create a program to do his job for him. At the time, I did not think anything of it. Later on, while I started my journey of choosing which colleges to apply to, I realized that this was not an easy process. I am lucky to be in a really small school with a great college advisor, but I know that when college advisors have to talk with hundreds if not thousands of kids, they may struggle. These two reasons are why I created this app. I wanted to help those who were struggling just like I once was.”
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.