Second Brain wins Rep. John Katko’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 24th District

Rep. John Katko has named Jared Duggal and Liam Qi from Fayette-Ville Manlius High School as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 24th District.

 

When asked what inspired the creation of Second Brain, the students said, “What inspired us to create this app was a multitude of factors stemming from Liam and I taking more AP courses (especially AP computer science) and harder classes. Which require more material and help on how to study and how to learn. It was also inspired by a productivity method where you take notes and they are organized in one place available to be used for many more things. I hope this app is used for students who are struggling as well as people who need help being more creative and help with organizing their life, notes and more. This app overall was created because of the need for it.”

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.