Help Me Budget wins Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 16th District
Rep. Jamaal Bowman has named Andrew Lewis and Matthew Tardif from Scarsdale High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 16th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Help Me Budget, the students said, “Our mission is to help low income families or families without experience in finance by showing them what they are spending and giving them suggestions. Many people don’t have easy access to this information, so we wanted to have one website where anyone could easily access assistance. We found that many online websites are extremely tedious and require users to input a lot of information. While those websites are useful for extremely detailed budgets, we wanted to make an app that would allow the user to obtain a basic and simple overview of their spending. Help Me Budget is straightforward and allows everyone to get a sense of their spending.”
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.