HeartHealth wins Rep. Donald Beyer’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s Eighth District

Rep. Donald Beyer has named Arnav Talreja, Anisha Talreja, and Neel Jain as the winners of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Virginia’s Eighth District.

When asked what inspired the creation of HeartHealth, the student said, ”Gwyneth Griffin was our neighbor who tragically passed away from an anoxic brain injury caused by a delay in emergency response after she had a cardiac arrest. Her death was preventable with proper CPR/AED administration, so we wanted to take action toward a world where no one had to lose their friend to a preventable death. We have been organizing CPR/AED training in middle schools across the county, but we wanted to create this app to make cardiac arrest response training even more accessible to all members of our community and beyond.”

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.