Disabled Health wins Rep. Joaquin Castro’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 20th District
Rep. Joaquin Castro has named Rishi Hariharaprasad, an 11th Grader at Brandeis High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 20th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Disabled Health, the student said, ”The prevalence of injury amongst disabled children is over four times as likely as that of a child without disabilities. Over half of the injuries dealt to disabled children occur at home, and around half of those injuries are caused by falling. These alarming statistics inspired me to create this app. AI technologies such as Siri don’t have readily available medical information; thus, it becomes incredibly hard to treat damages done at home, especially when the injury happens unexpectedly. 62% of adults with disabilities say that they own a computer, while 81% of adults without disabilities say that they own a computer. This gap comes from the fact that it is incredibly hard to use computers if you are disabled, even with the new technology to help aid this problem. I wanted to create this app so that disabled people can help treat their injuries faster and have an easier time navigating technology.”
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.