My ADLE wins Rep. Veronica Escobar’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 16th District.
Rep. Veronica Escobar has named Lisa Rondeau from Harmony School of Science as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 16th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of My ADLE, the student said, “My inspiration for My ADLE was the past and current state of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the start of the pandemic, I witnessed how many senior citizens, including my grandmother, struggled to find information on many basic everyday resources such as food, shelter, transportation, and routine and emergency medical care. This pandemic also made it harder for older adults and those with disabilities to socialize because many community centers and places they routinely visited were abruptly closing. Now that there is a vaccine and senior citizens and those with disabilities are trying to adapt to their “new” routines, it is important for them to have readily available information that will help them reach those very important resources that they need. It is my hope that the My ADLE application will continue to be updated throughout the years to continue providing this vital information to those who need it the most, and prevent the stress that was caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
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.