K-FACTOR wins Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 16th District
Rep. Jamaal Bowman has named Advait Pavuluri, a 12th Grader at New Rochelle High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 16th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of K-FACTOR, the student said, ”While volunteering at a local medical office I realized how many hypertensive and kidney patients struggle to track their Sodium and Potassium in-take due to lack of information and no easy way to get it even when it is available; which was turning out to be potentially life threatening in many cases. It is hard to comprehend and calculate the ratio of Sodium and Potassium in the food (what I call the K-FACTOR) – which is extremely important to take into account in food. Moreover, most of the time the nutrition information is in small print, making it hard for elderly population to read. I thought about this app to help people manage their Sodium and Potassium in-take in food in an easy to use manner.”
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.