Devs Do Good Web App wins Rep. Cynthia Axne’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Iowa’s Third District
Rep. Cynthia Axne has named Connor Fogarty, Noah Goeders, Uma Dukle, and Abhushan Pradhan of West Des Moines Valley High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Iowa’s Third District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Devs Do Good Web App, the students said, “In the greater Des Moines area there are more than 150 nonprofits – many of which don’t have the technical resources or funding to advance their digital capabilities. Meanwhile there are skilled students in our high schools and colleges passionate about technology and eager to get real-world, hands-on experience. Our organization brings these groups together during events called hackathons. At these hackathons, student volunteers work together to build a technology solution for a nonprofit that doesn’t have the technical resources to complete the project on their own.
After organizing and/or participating in multiple hackathons, we wanted to build an application that helps teams focus on building websites instead of managing the various tools and technologies needed to build them. Additionally, we wanted to provide a friendly dashboard for our nonprofits so they can access the technology behind their site.
Our application helps us achieve our mission by consolidating the tools and services needed to develop our nonprofit websites in a single dashboard. In addition to saving time, our application saves our nonprofits money. Unlike other form backend providers, which have a limited free-tier and require a subscription plan for more form submissions, our app is free for the nonprofits we serve. Organizations have unlimited submissions, forms, filters, and more.
From experience working with nonprofits, we know the process of updating the content of a website can be a confusing and tedious process, especially for organizations without a dedicated webmaster. We wanted to further simplify this process by providing access to these services with the click of a button.”
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.