procrastiNOT wins Rep. Danny Davis’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s Seventh District
Rep. Danny Davis has named Aviral Mehrotra of Walter Payton College Preparatory High School, Aarushi Mehrotra of Whitney Young Magnet High School, and Avi Dhir of Walter Payton College Preparatory High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s Seventh District.
When asked what inspired the creation of procrastiNOT, the students said, “During our academic careers, we have observed that many students tend to put off their assignments. This is a problem we have personally faced as well. The American Psychological association estimates that close to 80 – 95 % of students procrastinate on their assignments leading to numerous negative effects ranging from impact to grades, to their physical and mental health resulting in an increased level of frustration, guilt, and stress. For some students, extreme long term impacts may include low self-esteem and psychological impairments like depression. We surveyed a large number of students and teachers in our school district Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to validate our hypothesis and what we had learnt from our research. 87% of the students we surveyed said they would love to have an app that can help them decide and create a homework completion plan. All the CPS teachers affirmed our hypothesis and endorsed that an app to help with student’s homework will be a great benefit.
We are passionate about helping others succeed so we decided to use our summer break to develop an app to help out students around the world so they can manage their homework better and achieve higher academic success.
The app we developed, called procrastiNOT, intends to solve the procrastination problem by prioritizing and scheduling students’ assignments and thereby putting an end to procrastination. Our app makes it easy for students to select assignments, guide them on which assignment should be done, in which order, and by when to give them a maximum value of time for best results.”
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.