Great Oaks wins Rep. Robert Scott’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s Third District

Rep. Robert Scott has named Justin Yoo, Alan Schuster, Luke Christie, and Sagun Venuganti of Governor’s School of Science and Technology as the winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s Third District.

When asked what inspired the creation of Great Oaks, the students said, “As we transition into the new school year, organizing time and tasks seem to have become significantly more difficult. This is likely due to our previous school year being online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Students, including ourselves, have little to no motivation and have trouble staying organized doing different tasks such as chores or homework. As a group, we wanted to create an app that helps and inspires both ourselves and our peers through task management. We hope that this app can help members of the community execute their ideas so the world can become a better place. We also hope that this app can relieve some of the stress the pandemic has brought through its ability to help users organize and remember their tasks.”

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.