Pecto wins Rep. Nikki Budzinski’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s 13th District
Rep. Budzinski has named Navtej Bhatti, a 10th grader at Glenwood High School, as the winner of the 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s 13th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Pecto, the student said, “Quizlet’s technical architecture (SSR) puts an outsized burden on their servers for the purpose of SEO (appearing on Google). What I found is that SEO does not matter for most high-schoolers, who either make their own flashcards or use their friend’s Quizlet. School curriculums and pacing vary a lot, even for APs.
SSR also costs more than CSR, especially at the scale Quizlet is doing. Quizlet has been forced to gate keep more and more features behind a premium tier to pay for these server costs. Additionally, their AI features, even if very useful, are prohibitively expensive. GPT3 is both detrimental for the environment due to expensive inference computation and very costly.
I felt that Pecto would be a great project to bridge this gap. Pecto is completely CSR, and all I ‘serve’ to the user is a collection of files that their devices interpret rather than the opposite way in SSR. Pecto’s multiple AI features are tuned and LLMs are not tangential to functionality; I use an NLP algorithm to do functionally the same with a fraction of the computation cost. Because of this, all AI features also run on the client side and no private data is ever sent to servers.”
This year’s Challenge saw an unprecedented level of participation, with 374 Members of the House of Representatives hosting competitions, surpassing the previous record of 340. A remarkable 11,334 students from across the United States competed in this year’s Challenge, marking an impressive increase of nearly 1,000 participants compared to the previous record set in 2019. The enthusiasm and creativity these students display is a testament to the growing interest in technology and signal a bright future for American innovation. The surge of ingenuity continued with a whopping 3,645 original applications flooding in, nearly a thousand more than the previous year’s high. This remarkable growth showcases the exceptional talent and innovation within our nation’s youth.
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. This resounding show of bipartisan support emphasizes the critical importance of STEM education in today’s rapidly evolving world. 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 2024 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May of 2024, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.