Pappas Presents First District Congressional App Challenge Award to Portsmouth High School Students

Today Congressman Chris Pappas (NH-01) met with New Hampshire’s First District’s 2024 Congressional App Challenge winners, Nicholas Gladu, Daniel Sabalakov, Joshua Kelly, and John Tobin of Portsmouth High School, and presented them with an award. This team of students created an app program, titled “Clarity Extension”, designed to make resources on the internet more accessible.

“Each year for the Congressional App Challenge, young, inspired Granite Staters are designing app programs aiming to help their community members, make resources more accessible, and overall make the world a better place,” said Congressman Pappas. “The challenge highlights the value of computer science and STEM education and prepares students with critical skills to succeed in the workforce. Great job to all the students who participated this year, and congratulations to Nicholas Gladu, Daniel Sabalakov, Joshua Kelly, and John Tobin on winning with their app program, Clarity Extension.”

When asked what inspired the creation of Clarity extension, the students said, “As students, we frequently engage with dense, high-level academic resources that are difficult to grasp without advanced knowledge. We wanted to create a tool that would make these resources more digestible, helping users learn from them more effectively. Additionally, students with learning disabilities often struggle with these academic resources, so we aimed to make them more accessible to this demographic. Two members of our team also have immigrant parents — a central life experience that made us passionate about the premise of Clarity. Recognizing the need for a tool that improves learning accessibility on the internet, we brainstormed the idea for Clarity. We chose to construct the application as a web extension to make the user experience as efficient and easy as possible. Ultimately, we identified a problem: many resources on the internet are too complex for a common learner who is reading about a subject for the first time. Then, we created a solution to make the learning process more digestible.”

The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. This resounding show of bipartisan support emphasizes the critical importance of STEM education in today’s rapidly evolving world.

The 2025 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.