Gematria by Jack wins Rep. Adriano Espaillat’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 13th District
Rep. Adriano Espaillat has named Jack Warren from Yeshiva University High School for Boys as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 13th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Gematria by Jack, the student said, “Throughout my time in elementary and middle school, one of the great contemporary Jewish scholars, Rabbi David Feinstein, was the Head of School. He was world-famous in all matters of Judaism and was particularly keen on Gematria. Whenever I attempted to look for a Gematria, I always encountered disappointment. It took a lot of time to calculate the numerical value of even a single word and most of the time, they never amounted to anything. When my father and I came up with an algorithm to obtain all the possible Gematrias within the Torah, we knew we struck gold.”
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.