By Forum Staff
Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-Flushing) on Tuesday announced the winners of her congressional app contest, and securing first place is a team of three local high school students: Rachel Wu of Fresh Meadows, Yuan Gao of Flushing and Eugene Xu of Bayside.
Meng’s competition, which consisted of entries from students in middle school and high school, is part of the “Congressional App Challenge,” a nationwide contest held by the House of Representatives in which students compete by creating and exhibiting an app for mobile, tablet or computer devices.
Wu, Gao and Xu, along with the winners from app contests in congressional districts throughout the United States, will now have their apps displayed for one year in the U.S. Capitol and on the House of Representatives’ official website, house.gov. They and the other winners have also been invited to showcase their apps to Members of Congress at #HouseOfCode, a special reception scheduled to take place on Capitol Hill this month.
Wu, Gao and Xu are seniors at Bronx High School of Science. The app they developed allows users to locate the closest available free bathrooms in public spaces along with corresponding information and reviews of those locations. It also provides the nearest free bathrooms in cafes, bookstores and other public establishments to provide a comprehensive and easily accessible resource for those who need to find a restroom.
In addition to Wu, Gao and Xu, there were second and third place winners for Meng’s contest. They include the following students:
- Second Place: Erin Yalin Cai, Frankie Chong and Chiming Wang for creating a web app that uses artificial intelligence to help users find personalized social welfare programs.
- Third Place: Aaron Niyazov and Jordan Krishnayah for developing an app that provides a news headline bias detector, where users can submit a news headline and gain a bias rating of it. The detector takes into account inflammatory terms as well as the sentiment of the headline.
Participants of the contest were permitted to compete individually or in teams of up to four students. All of the apps were required to be original in concept, design and execution.
The winners of Meng’s competition were selected by a panel of local judges who work within the academic, tech and coding fields. They include:
- Ying Zhou, Executive Director of the Tech Incubator at Queens College.
- Jukay Hsu, Co-Founder and CEO of Pursuit, a social impact organization that trains people for tech careers.
- Becky Houran, Program Implementation Manager at Girls Who Code.
- Jin Hyun Bae, Assistant Director of Digital Inclusion for the Programs and Services Department at the Queens Public Library.
- Ray Ferrer, Senior Digital Learning Curriculum Developer at the New York Hall of Science.
Meng noted that 11,334 students registered for this year’s competition and 3,645 fully functioning apps were entered. 374 Members of Congress from across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa and the District of Columbia participated. This year’s contest also set the record for most student registrations and most apps submitted.
