A Better Shopping List wins Rep. Liz Cheney’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Wyoming’s At-Large District

Rep. Liz Cheney has named Savannah McIntyre from Kelly Walsh High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Wyoming’s At-Large District.

When asked what inspired the creation of A Better Shopping List, the student said, “I wanted to create something that people in my life would actively use and benefit from. So, I asked my peers what app they wish existed. The most common answer was a shopping list that organized itself. I know from personal experience that this would lift a small burden off of many people’s shoulders. My mom’s shopping list is always all over the place. Items that are next to each other in the store are on opposite sides of the list! This leads to a lot of backtracking and forgotten items. If there were a way to organize the trip by location, it would be so much faster. Less things would also be forgotten. My initial thought was to create an app that scans any grocery store layout and organizes by where items are located. The app would know exactly where to find specific items, then plan out the fastest route for the shopper to take. However, that project is a bit too ambitious for one person. I decided to just take a user’s shopping list and organize it by type. I made this decision because items in the same section are likely to be near each other. This also encourages the user to know everything they are looking for in one specific area without forgetting anything. This also makes things more simple for the average user compared to the complex map analysis. I wanted this app to be easily used and accessible, since everybody goes grocery shopping. Now, thanks to “A Better Shopping List”, any shopping list can automatically be laid out nicely.”

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.