Helping Hands wins Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 10th District
Rep. Jerrold Nadler has named Aiden Ackerman, an 11th Grader at Stuyvesant High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 10th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Helping Hands, the student said, ”The homelessness crisis that has exploded in NYC for the past few years, as well as my personal experiences seeing homeless people on the streets and subways, or those hanging on barely, with no way to claw out of their hole, have inspired me to establish this app and website. There are also many who are overlooked/do not receive adequate aid, who are not homeless, but on the edge, and aid must also be provided to them or they could fall into homeless — by being proactive, we can prevent development of the crisis before it gets worse.”
The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent.
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, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.