Green Warrior wins Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Michigan’s 13th District

Rep. Rashida Tlaib has named Yaritza Campos from Hope of Detroit as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Michigan’s 13th District.

 

When asked what inspired the creation of Green Warrior, the student said, “The problems that my city faces are excessive amounts of garbage, used tires left in abandoned buildings, abandoned homes left unboarded up, and homelessness. In 2011, Detroit ranked dead last out of 27 North American cities in Siemens’ U.S. and Canada Green City Index, which measured environmental performance across nine categories, including waste.  Everywhere my students look all you see is trash around their neighborhood and in the parks where kids play. In Detroit a significant percentage of housing parcels in the city are vacant, with abandoned lots making up more than half of total residential lots in large portions of the city. With at least 70,000 abandoned buildings, 31,000 empty houses, and 90,000 vacant lots, Detroit has become notorious for its city’s urban decay. With high rates of poverty, low access to employment opportunities, and lack of resources It should not come as a surprise that the homeless rate is around 10,000 in Detroit. The goal of our project is to combat all four major problems by using technology.  We want to create an app called Green Warrior.”

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.