CoronaSafe wins Rep. Jamie Raskin’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Maryland’s Eighth District

Rep. Jamie Raskin has named Ainesh Chatterjee, Charles Wang, Botond Parkanyi, and Salamun Nuhin of Walter Johnson High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Maryland’s Eighth District.

When asked what inspired the creation of CoronaSafe, the students said, “We saw and felt the internal panic that people experience every time they go out during the pandemic. The question “Is today the day I get sick?” is always in the back of everyone’s minds. So, we wanted to create an application that allowed people to be more informed about the world around them. We wanted people to be able to find how busy a place would be with extreme ease and to make it even more convenient, give them a simple “threat” bar to look at. The goal behind the app was an incredibly simple UI with a powerful backend so that the user had a seamless experience while the high-quality backend development ensured quality results every time. To add to this, since our goal was to provide convenient access to information, we also included a button that opens an interactive heat map of live US COVID-19 case data. It sources the data directly from the constantly updating New York Times COVID cases.”

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.