College Help Wins Rep. Taylor’s (TX-03) 2019 Congressional App Challenge
Rep. Van Taylor has named three Prosper students as the winner of the Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 3rd district. Prosper High School’s Arjun Desai, Nathanael Ding and Bharat Nair submitted College Help, an app that provides students with one-stop college information.
When asked they were passionate about creating a college preparation app the students replied, “One day during our second semester of Junior year, we started discussing our plans for colleges. This is when we realized that there were so many options to go through and not one specific place we could go to in order to research a college. ” They hope to encourage other students to better their communities by using their computer science skills.
Over 10,000 students registered for the 2019 Congressional App Challenge. These students created and submitted 2,177 functioning apps, marking the end of the most successful Congressional App Challenge to date. All told, 304 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 48 states, Puerto Rico, the Mariana Islands, and Washington, D.C.
The CAC is an 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. The non-profit Internet Education Foundation provides the CAC with supplemental staffing and support. In the five years of the Congressional App Challenge, the program has yielded 1134 App Challenges across 48 states. Thousands of functional apps have been created by over 25,000 students, and participant demographics surpass all industry diversity metrics.