Olive wins Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Connecticut’s Third District

Rep. Rosa DeLauro has named Leighla-Marie Dantes and Violet Wilson from Joseph A. Foran as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Connecticut’s Third District.

 

When asked what inspired the creation of Olive, the students said, “We were first inspired when we realized how many people we knew had turned to food tracking apps because of their weight gain and/or vitamin deficiencies, only to find it negatively impacting their mental health. After doing some research, we realized how the pandemic had impacted the rate of eating disorders and disordered eating in people our age and how the way food tracking apps are set up can incidentally promote eating disorder pathology.”

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.