Connect wins Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 25th District
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart has named Ronit Sohal, an 11th Grader at Doral Academy Charter High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s 25th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Connect, the student said, ”My primary inspiration behind creating this app were my grandparents back in India as I find they are lonely with no grandchildren or children around. The app solves this problem as it connects senior citizens with other senior citizens in the same area. While this may have been my primary inspiration as it led to the idea, I had other inspirations as well such as my interest in Computer Science. I wanted to see what I was capable of and wanted to apply what I have learned and continue to learn in an actual project.”
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.