Pocket Constitution wins Rep. Janice Schakowsky’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s Ninth District

Rep. Janice Schakowsky has named Artem Khaiet, a 12th Grader at Prospect High School, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s Ninth District.

When asked what inspired the creation of Pocket Constitution, the student said, ”Youth voter turnout has been consistently lower than for other age groups despite many political issues affecting my peers. Though there are many reasons for this, I think two of the main ones are ignorance and indifference towards politics. Many teenagers simply do not know a lot about how American politics works and the topic is often overlooked in schools. To battle this problem, I transferred the Constitution to a medium that my peers would be familiar with and would find engaging – a phone application – while also adding interactive and well-designed educational elements to it in addition to the actual text. I hope that this material, combined with links to nonprofits that encourage the youth to get involved with politics on all levels, will contribute to solving the problem of youth underrepresentation in the political arena.”

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.