Incentiva wins Rep. Victoria Spartz’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Indiana’s Fifth District
Rep. Victoria Spartz has named Aryadeep Buddha and Chris Farber from Hamilton Southeastern High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Indiana’s Fifth District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Incentiva, the students said, “Given the recent mental health crisis of the previous 1.5 years, the lack of access to basic mental health care, and the general lack of energy from staying at home, we wanted to create this app to hopefully mitigate these issues. We thought of common things students/people generally would need to be productive, and we figured a simple task manager would be a good idea to start with. However, we wanted to do something larger, so that’s when we thought of the idea to incorporate task data with some metric of happiness. This theoretically would help the user gain insight into what types of tasks make them happier and what actions they can take to improve their mental health. Standard task managers only keep track of the user’s tasks, and don’t offer any further information on how they could be more productive. We hope to fix this problem with Incentiva.”
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.