Over the past four months, thousands of students across the nation coded original apps as part of the 2017 Congressional App Challenge, a competition hosted by Members of the US House of Representatives. In early December, a team attending Westwood High School was named the winner for Texas’s 10th Congressional District.
Representative Michael T. McCaul announced that the project Intercept …. Before it’s too late created by Eesha Nayak and Dia Jain took the prize for District 10, which includes part of Austin. The team says they created this app to help alert parents when harmful moods may be affecting their children. The app works by using a computer’s camera to capture images of the child during regular computer usage. Those images are run through a face recognition API that analyzes mood patterns. The app sends alert messages to the parent if harmful moods are detected.
The Congressional App Challenge will invite winners from across the country to showcase their apps to the Members of Congress and members of the tech community at a reception on Capitol Hill in April. Their work is eligible to be featured for one year on the permanent display in the U.S. Capitol Building and on the House.gov website. Each winning student will also be awarded $250 in Amazon Web Service credits, donated by Amazon Web Services.
The Congressional App Challenge aims to engage students in coding and computer science. In all, 190 Congressional districts across 42 states hosted app challenges for their student constituents. More than 4,100 students participated in the 14-week regional competitions, submitting more than 1,270 original student-created apps. The rest of the winners are listed online at CongressionalAppChallenge.us.
