2025 Congressional App Challenge winners announced

The 2025 Congressional App Challenge winners from Washington’s 1st and 2nd districts: middle schoolers Dylan and Henry Pham’s game combating vaccine misinformation, and high schoolers Isabella Li, Hiya Pandey, and Anya Mehta’s app for early anemia detection. Both apps will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol.

Representative Rick Larsen (WA-02) named the Pham brothers at Explorer Middle School in Everett, for winning the 2025 Congressional App Challenge with their entry, “Epidemic Wars: The 2100 Era” which seeks to educate people about vaccines and the immune system to combat vaccine misinformation.

“Every year, talented students in Northwest Washington sharpen their coding skills and get out of their comfort zones by competing in the Congressional App Challenge,” said Larsen. “This year’s winners, Dylan Pham and Henry Pham, developed a creative app to fight vaccine misinformation through interactive education about immune health. Congratulations to Dylan and Henry, and all the students who competed.”

“We built a strategy game to help people understand vaccines and how the immune system works, and to think more carefully about health claims,” said Dylan Pham. “Making the app also taught us persistence because we hit a lot of bugs at first, but we kept fixing and improving it. We’re really excited and honored to win the Congressional App Challenge.”

“Working on this project helped me be more careful with information,” said Henry. “I learned to double-check facts with reliable sources and not rely only on AI answers.”

Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (WA-01) announced AnemoDx, coded by Isabella Li, Hiya Pandey, and Anya Mehta from Redmond High School, as the winner of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge from Washington’s 1^st Congressional District.

Source: Office of Suzan DelBene (D-WA01)

AnemoDx is an app that serves as a non-invasive, early warning system for people with anemia by helping users estimate their hemoglobin levels and alert them if they are too high or too low. It encourages users to seek out medical attention when necessary, making it especially useful to those who are prone to anemia and people in underprivileged or rural areas who may have limited access to regular blood tests or healthcare facilities. A demo of AnemoDx can be found here.

The winning app was selected by a panel of impartial judges from our local technology community.

The panel also awarded second place to Bill Brain, created by Abhinav Bandaru, Vishvath Vinesh, Lohith Thimmichetty, and Ghirish Senthil Kumar from Lake Stevens High School, and third place to Swift Permit, created by Arron Randhawa, Rohan Chilikuri, and Ishwin Baweja from Lake Washington High School.

The Congressional App Challenge is an annual competition that aims to help maintain U.S. competitiveness by inspiring middle school and high school students to pursue crucial STEM skills. For more information about the Congressional App Challenge, visit https://www.congressionalappchallenge.us/.