Alphine wins Rep. Nikki Budzinski’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s 13th District
Rep. Nikki Budzinski has named John Kim of Centennial High School as the winner of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s 13th District. Their app Alphine is a Chrome extension that helps users understand English text on a browser.
When asked what inspired the creation of Alphine, John Kim said, “As a former ESL student, I often found myself in a struggle when reading English texts. The summer before my sophomore year, the AP World Summer Assignment sat on my desk: six chapters, each of which was thicker than my vocabulary. I still remember spending most of my time finding out the meanings of words instead of reading. This whole exercise was, of course, counterproductive and pointless. This episode made me realize just how big an obstacle vocabulary is to a language – coming across words you have never encountered before can make you lose all your focus, and demoralize you in the process. This experience is what pushed me to create Alphine, and I mentioned in the past how I would have liked to create a solution that would spare many students my experience of endlessly browsing tabs and books just to make sense of a sentence. I discovered there is a large population of ESL students in my district who have to confront the same problems I faced in English and world history classes. The objective of creating Alphine was to provide them with a resource that would help them with reading English texts and vocabulary acquisition in a positive and engaging way.”
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.