Cervical Cancer Risk Assessor wins Rep. Jake Auchincloss’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’s Fourth District

Rep. Jake Auchincloss has named Aiden Taghinia from Newton North High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Massachusetts’s Fourth District.

 

When asked what inspired the creation of Cervical Cancer Risk Assessor, the student said, “There are 14,000 cases of cervical cancer each year in the U.S. Sixty percent of these women were not screened for cervical cancer, and 22% did not follow-up appropriately after an abnormal screening test result. Therefore, the vast majority of cases would be prevented through proper screening and management. However, the annual number of cervical cancer cases has shown no improvement in the last 20 years. In fact, Congress has identified stagnant cervical cancer survival rates as one of its top three priorities for women’s health in 2021. The aim of this app is to increase knowledge and understanding of cervical cancer screening, and enable an individual to easily understand and manage their test results. My mother, a gynecologist, provided the idea for the app, and used her experience to optimize accuracy and clarity, and I produced all the coding and functionality. The information available on the static pages of the website covers various topics of cervical cancer screening in detail, and the Personalized Risk Assessment provides as much information as possible to the user about their specific test results, including pre-cancer risk values and recommended management. The app has the potential to be very helpful and influential to many women and their healthcare providers, and it is a project of which I am very proud.”

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.