Food pantries supply-chain app wins 2018 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’ 2nd Congressional District represented by James P. McGovern
WASHINGTON, DC – This year, over 220 Members of the U.S. House of Representatives held a Congressional App Challenge. The Congressional App Challenge aims to engage students in computer science. The Congressional App Challenge spans 47 states and territories.
During the last four months, over five thousand students coded original apps as part of the district-wide competitions hosted by their Members of Congress.
The office of Representative James P. McGovern is happy to announce Massachusetts’ 2nd Congressional District winner to be the VeGETables app created by Vishnu Penubarthi, Tian Yu Fan, Mary Barsoum, and Akshay Gopinathan. The students attend Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science in Shrewsbury, MA. They created this app to mediate between supermarkets and food pantries by offering a platform for food pantries to request food that is in need from supermarkets that may have an excess of that item.
Over 5,200 students participated in the regional competitions. They submitted over 1,700 original student-created apps, a 96% growth in number of apps from last year’s App Challenge. The rest of the winners will be listed online at CongressionalAppChallenge.us over the next month. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to view the announcements of winners from each Member of Congress.
The Congressional App Challenge will invite winners from across the country to showcase their apps to the Members of Congress and members of the tech community at #HouseOfCode, a reception in Washington, DC in Spring 2019. Their work is eligible to be featured for one year on the permanent display in the U.S. Capitol Building and on the House.gov website. Each winning student will also be awarded $250 in AWS credits, generously donated by Amazon Web Services’ AWS Educate program.
Congratulations to all the students who participated!
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About the Congressional App Challenge
The Congressional App Challenge’s mission is to inspire, include, and innovate efforts around STEM and computer science education. The CAC is an initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science.The House of Representatives created the Congressional App Challenge (CAC) through the passage of H. Res 77 in 2013. The non-profit Internet Education Foundation provides the CAC with supplemental staffing and support. In the first four years of the Congressional App Challenge, the program has yielded 830 App Challenges across 47 states and territories. Since 2015, more than 4,000 functional apps have been created by over 14,000 students, and participant demographics surpass all industry diversity metrics.
The 2018 Congressional App Challenge is possible thanks to the generous support of our sponsors: Capital One, Microsoft, Democracy Fund, Verizon Foundation, Amazon Web Services, Southwest Airlines, the United Parcel Service, BSA (Business Software Alliance) Foundation, CA Technologies, Synchrony (SYF) and the Copyright Alliance. The Challenge also owes gratitude to Representatives Bob Goodlatte and Anna G. Eshoo, co-chairs of the Congressional Internet Caucus, who initiated the creation of the CAC. Representatives French Hill and Suzan DelBene serve as 2018 Challenge co-chairs.