WishFood wins Rep. Suzan DelBene’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Washington’s First District
Rep. Suzan DelBene has named Abhinav Akkiraju of Inglemoor High School and Albert Du of Inglemoor High School as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Washington’s First District.
When asked what inspired the creation of WishFood, the students said, ”What inspired us to create WishFood is the idea that there is just so much food being wasted by grocery stores and restaurants each year. Billions of pounds of waste are being produced by these two types of organizations, and this is having harmful effects on both global warming and food insecurity. At the end of the day, most restaurants throw away any ingredients or food that they weren’t able to sell that day; this is the same case for grocery stores that aren’t able to sell a food product by its sell-by date. Although these foods are perfectly fine to consume, they are being completely wasted. Our app not only prevents excess waste from clogging up landfills, but it also helps to mitigate food insecurity by providing food to those who aren’t fortunate enough to be able to waste food. We care very deeply about solving these two crises, and that is why we are planning on continuing this app even after the competition in order to make a change in the way food is being stored.”
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.