Prescribed wins Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s 12th District
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman has named Tianran Song of Rutgers Preparatory School, Daniel Tan of Rutgers Preparatory School, and Ian Song of Dwight School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s 12th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Prescribed, the students said, “When my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer, her doctors were unhelpful with explanations and she was left confused. She was afflicted by an issue known as health literacy and she was not alone. A study done by the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) “identified limited health literacy as a population-level problem of enormous proportion, affecting nearly 9 out of 10 English-speaking adults in the United States.” Limited health literacy is associated with poor health. In order to help my grandmother and other patients who share this problem, we developed the Prescribed app to facilitate communication between patients and doctors.”
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.