Senior Aniruddh Mishra was awarded Second Place in the 2022 US Congressional App Challenge for his website on Dec. 13, 2022. The portion of the website that he coded, dashboard.educationisttutoring.org, will be displayed in the US Capitol Building for an entire year for the general public to see. 

The US Congressional App Challenge is a computer science competition for middle and high school students overseen and judged by members of the US House of Congress on a district-wide scale. As part of the challenge, students create and submit original apps where they showcase their skills in several areas, such as programming, coding and design. Aniruddh’s website was amongst thousands that were submitted to the challenge nation-wide. 

“Honestly, I was surprised [that I won 2nd Place],” Aniruddh said. “My friend applied to the Congressional App Challenge for my website, but he didn’t tell me that much about it. He just said ‘Hey, your app is pretty cool and I’m just going to apply it to the organization’ and I said ‘That sounds good’. A couple of weeks later, I get called into the counselor’s office out of nowhere and there’s an award from Congress in there.”

Principal Mack Eagleton was present when Aniruddh received his award from the US Congress. He is proud of Aniruddh’s accomplishment and sees great potential in his future. 

“I believe Aniruddh will continue to positively impact thousands of individuals throughout the world,” Principal Eagleton said. “Preeminently, as in the case of Aniruddh, I hope others will be inspired to identify a problem and possess the conviction of service to create, pursue, embrace, and employ a remedy for the betterment of all. Undoubtedly, I am convinced every Maverick at McNeil High School has limitless potential to achieve exceptional exploits of excellence.”

Aniruddh launched the official website, educationisttutoring.org, in January of 2021 with Nikhil Devaraj and Aaditya Ganesan, two of his friends from Westwood High School. When initially founded, the website offered free online tutoring taught by people all over the globe for students solely in India. 

“Two of my friends and I realized that in India, a lot of the educational opportunities are reserved for paid tuition classes and everyone has to do those,” Aniruddh said. “It’s almost as if you do school, but then you have to pay a lot of money to understand what you’re learning. That didn’t seem reasonable to us, so what we wanted to do was give students educational opportunities across the world, especially in India at that time.”

After some time since its founding, the website’s users extended beyond India. The website now offers tutoring on an international scale. 

“Another reason why we started the website was for cultural interactions,” Aniruddh said. “Originally, we just started in India and these students are meeting tutors from across the world, like Australia, Britain, America, and so many cultures get to meet each other and they gain more than just academics. We then spread our resources around the world so that students from all ages and areas can register from our website.” 

Currently, the organization has over 1,500 students and 2,000 tutors worldwide. However, this mass following was not achieved overnight. In fact, it took a year for the website to gain this amount of users and hundreds of hours of development on behalf of Aniruddh and his friends, along with personal learning. 

“I actually didn’t know how to code before I started this organization,” Aniruddh said. “We were doing everything by hand when we started, which took a lot of hours per week. Then I decided that I wanted to learn how to code to make this easier, so I went through various versions of Python scripts that would work for the website, and then we had IDs that we created for each student and tutor.” 

Although the website is now nationally recognized, this doesn’t stop Aniruddh from wanting to improve his work. 

“I recently went to India over winter break and I found some things that caught my attention and those are things that we can change to better the organization,” Aniruddh said. “We have a good website and I’m sure it works for a lot of people, but there’s some parts of it that I think we can just make it easier. We’re working on that with the second launch of the website, which will be awesome to get out there.”

Thanks to the US Congressional App Challenge, Aniruddh’s website will be able to have greater publicity. Aside from being displayed in the US Capitol Building, it will also be featured in House.gov, the US House of Representatives’ official website. 

“I’m excited that we can get a platform to share this message on because it’s something that we can’t just do through a website alone,” Aniruddh said. “We need more volunteers in the organization to make our goal happen. Having the Congressional App Challenge platform is amazing because we can have a bigger reach and make a greater impact.” 

To keep up with latest announcements from educationisttutoring.org, follow the organization on the following social media platforms:

Instagram: @educationisttutoring

TikTok: @educationisttutoring

Discord: @educationisttutoring

LinkedIn: @Educationist Tutoring