They were high school students, and they were in the Capitol Building for #HouseOfCode 2025, which invited the winners of the Congressional App Challenge to come and show off their award-winning projects. Representing 46 different states, the winners demonstrated their work in the august halls of the Capitol Visitor Center Atrium, where lawmakers, industry leaders and members of the general public spent the day checking out apps and hearing the stories of the students who made them.
The way the Congressional App Challenge works is that students submit apps to the U.S. representatives who represent the districts where they live. The lawmakers then each select one winner. As such, this week’s events had students from a wide range of districts, with no two projects coming from the exact same town. And this gave rise to a wide range of ideas and projects.
There were apps designed to help people eat healthier foods. There were apps for seniors to keep track of medications that caused them to experience side effects. There were apps designed to protect communities from the threat of wildfires. The list went on and on.
And many of those apps combined technical prowess — knowledge of artificial intelligence, machine learning and user experience design common at nearly every table — with the personal experiences of the young people who made and executed the programs.
Winston Fan is a junior at West High School in Iowa City, Iowa, where he competes on the swim team. Fan said that in the past three years, the competitive swim community in Iowa has lost three swimmers to suicide, including one member of his own squad.
So he wanted to address this problem with technology. He did research and discovered a global loneliness epidemic, then decided to focus on loneliness as one factor he could tackle within the wider range of causes of self-harm. He then trained and tested machine learning models on posts from Reddit — specifically the subreddit for loneliness — to detect signs that someone might be struggling.
Through a process of data collection, model training and testing, Fan created an app called LONIQ-AI, which mental health-care providers can use for help identifying signs of loneliness.
Zack Quaintance/GT
Fan’s project was just one of the many on display, of course.
Aiden Kim — a junior at Arnold O. Beckman High School in Irvine, Calif. — was part of a team with Isaac Sohn of Orange County School of the Arts, and they developed an app called Student Safe Way. The app aims to help students in sunny Southern California — where walking, biking and even e-biking to school are common in the temperate weather — arrive to class safely.
It’s a group-sourced app that enables users to share info about hazardous conditions on the road, or for parents to track their children's trip and ensure they arrive without incident. Their idea came after a student they knew was involved in an accident while e-biking.
Liliana Barcenas — a senior at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago — built an app called PharmaTrack, which tracks medications that cause patients to experience side effects.
Barcenas’ app was inspired by watching her grandparents attend doctors appointments with folders of information about the medicines they were taking. Many times, she said, her grandparents could not remember which medications had the worst side effects, tending to complain the most about whichever drug they had last been prescribed.
Barcenas, who is hoping to attend the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the fall, was definitely enjoying her time at #HouseOfCode. She said she’d met other students from across the country, and it had been informative to see what they had developed and why. It didn’t hurt that it was springtime, and Washington, D.C.’s famous cherry blossom trees had just bloomed outside.
“It’s really great to see what other people have come here with,” she said, “... and also, being at the Capitol is just really cool.”
Barcenas and the other attendees faced steep competition getting to #HouseOfCode 2025, with organizers reporting that 12,682 took part in the most recent Congressional App Challenge, submitting a record total of 3,881 projects.
The next Congressional App Challenge is slated to launch in May, and pre-registration is open now. Submitting, of course, is a crucial step for students who hope to show off their own projects in the halls of the U.S. Capitol next year.
