The 190 participating members of the U.S. House of Representatives announced the winners of the 2017 Congressional App Challenge recently. Over the last four months, thousands of students coded original apps as part of district-wide competitions. 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. Congressional participation was widespread and remarkably bipartisan.

The office of Rep. Barbara Lee is happy to announce California’s 13th Congressional District winner to be the “GNR: Restroom for All” app created by Hannah Barr, Jui-Han Yang, Raymond Huang and Vivian Phung. This team attends Alameda Science and Technology Institute where this team are involved in “Kode with Klossy.” The students used Python (/Flask), Bootstrap, Jinja2, HTML and CSS to create this app. The team created this app to alleviate pressure on those who do not identify with the two primary genders. Having friends who face this situation daily, the team realized how hard finding gender-neutral restrooms can be. The app they created searches for and returns the locations of restrooms based on a given zip code. 

More than 4,100 students participated in the 14-week regional competitions. They submitted some 1,270 original student-created apps. The rest of the winners are listed online at CongressionalAppChallenge.us. The Congressional App Challenge will invite winners from across the country to showcase their apps to members of Congress and the tech community at #HouseOfCode, a reception on Capitol Hill to be held 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.