Seen wins Rep. Jared Huffman’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in California’s Second District
Rep. Jared Huffman has named Alexander Cameron and Damien Boisvert of San Marin High School as the winners of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge in California’s Second District. Their app Seen is a mental health application designed to provide a space for teens to reflect on their thoughts and feelings.
When asked what inspired the creation of Seen, the students said, “In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on all of us, isolating families and dividing communities. Looking online, we saw the effects of this isolation as teenagers vocalized feelings of depression and anxiety, feeling alone and struggling to find support. Even after the quarantine ended, these stories stuck with us and made us aware of the unseen struggles people our age have been going through. Since then, we have seen firsthand even more teenagers struggling with their mental health within our communities, both in schools and online, as poorer self-help habits became more common. Friends of ours fought their battles alone, feeling unable to vocalize their emotions and struggling to access resources such as mental health apps due to concerns with privacy. We wanted to help, yet felt powerless to do so.
“Looking to find a way to help, we turned to our passion for programming. With teenagers becoming more connected to technology, we realized creating an app would be the perfect way to reach them in a place they felt comfortable. Understanding how challenging it could feel to start getting help, we wanted to find a way to give teenagers easy access to support and resources while also providing smaller-scale actionable suggestions. By doing this, we felt as though we could directly participate in helping our community through these challenges many are facing.”
The 2025 Congressional App Challenge marked another record-setting year for the program. A total of 394 Members of the U.S. House of Representatives hosted App Challenges in their congressional districts, the highest level of participation in the program’s history. More than 13,800 students from across the country participated, submitting over 4,600 original apps focused on real-world challenges ranging from health and accessibility to education, sustainability, and civic engagement.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives that encourages middle school and high school students to learn to code, explore computer science, and build practical technology solutions for their communities. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and winning teams are invited to showcase their projects to Members of Congress, staff, and industry leaders at the annual #HouseOfCode celebration on Capitol Hill.
The Challenge is proudly bipartisan and reflects a shared commitment to expanding access to STEM education and preparing the next generation of American innovators for the future workforce. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from the Broadcom Foundation, AWS, Infosys Foundation USA, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2026 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.