Realms: Health wins Rep. Jose “Lou” Correa’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 46th District
Rep. Jose “Lou” Correa has named Eric Ly, Justin Pham, Derek Nguyen, and Joanne Tran of Garden Grove High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 46th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Realms: Health, the students said, “Our team’s inspiration to create the app was to make an app that would provide real value to our community. Seeing as how our immigrant parents have routine issues with access to vital healthcare information and resources, we wanted to create a healthcare platform that would work for all citizens.
Eventually, we hope to expand Realms: Health to other nations to create a world-wide access to healthcare information and resources. And in the future, our team hopes to expand the Realms: ecosystem that would address issues such as food waste and political voicelessness.”
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.