Aqua Manager wins Rep. Jimmy Gomez’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 34th District
Rep. Jimmy Gomez has named Benjamin Lee, a 10th Grader at Loyola High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 34th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Aqua Manager, the student said, ”Los Angeles has been through a lot of droughts and doesn’t exactly have the most amount of water. I noted that many people agreed that we needed to save water, but most of them didn’t know how to start. Since June 1, 2022, the city of LA released new rules for water use, and I followed them to help save water. However, I noted that many people weren’t even aware of the existence of the LA city rules and had no clue about other resources and benefits they could obtain. I also noted that even after knowing the rules, many thought the rules were somewhat complicated due to the date and time limit on water use. I wanted to create an app that helps people manage their water usage and helps them understand the LA City Water Rules.”
The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent.
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, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.