Surviving the Pandemic while Back-to-School wins Rep. Ruben Gallego’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Arizona’s Seventh District
Rep. Ruben Gallego has named Kamille Cuison, Liana Kay De Guzman, and Nathan Caldwell-Meeks from University High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Arizona’s Seventh District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Surviving the Pandemic while Back-to-School, the students said, “Many of us students are returning back to school, in-person, for the first time in a while ever since we had to switch to online learning because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, we made this app to remind students, in Arizona specifically, that Covid-19 is still a huge issue that is affecting many people, and there still needs to be actions taken by everyone, especially students, to ensure the safety of all.”
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.