Ocean Pollution Rescue wins Rep. William Keating’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’s Ninth District
Rep. William Keating has named Joseph D’Angelo from Pembroke High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’s Ninth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Ocean Pollution Rescue, the student said, “What inspired me to create Ocean Pollution Rescue was the incredibly large amount of pollution in the ocean that is destroying the natural ecosystems. I felt that little was being done to take action against the destruction of the ocean that covers 70 percent of our Earth so I decided I needed to inspire a large amount of people to take action as something major must be done. I figured that there is no better way to inspire others than a game so I came up with the idea of Ocean Pollution Rescue.”
The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After eighteen months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the Congressional App Challenge came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for this year’s competition. All told, 340 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.
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, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.
The 2022 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2022, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.