CASPER, Wyo. — Kelly Walsh High School students Arjit Bhavsar and Ben Hutchinson recently took part in Wyoming’s prestigious Congressional App Challenge where they ended up earning second and third, respectively.
Bhavsar earned the silver for creating a Teen Mental Health Guide app, which provides adolescents and teens with mental health resources and tools to improve and learn more about mental health.
Though Bhavsar didn’t have any experience with coding until he decided on a whim to take a coding class with teacher Becky Byer, he took to it like a fish to water.
“I really like the complexities of solutions in coding, and how you can do basically anything with code,” he said.
The idea for his app came easily, as Bhavsar said he’s long been interested in mental health, especially among younger demographics. While in middle school, he said, he even won his school’s science fair with a project about mental health.
While the subject matter was personal to him, the Kelly Walsh student gave himself a challenge by designing an app in HTML, a format he had no prior experience coding in. Though somewhat apprehensive about working in a new program for the first time, he said he decided to proceed with it because HTML seemed to be the best fit for the project.
“There isn’t a real back-end to speak of, because all of the resources are basically there on the front end,” he said.
“One thing about Arjit is that he is persistent; and if he doesn’t know how to get something to work, he will persevere and do everything he can to fix it,” Byer added.
Work was divided into two phases, Bhasvar explained: the technical coding and the research of the information that will be available on the app.
Though the competition is now over, Bhasvar is still working on and tinkering with his app, and he said he hopes for it to one day be integrated into Natrona County School District’s existing mental health support systems.
Placing directly behind Bhasvar was Hutchinson, who submitted an app called Grapher that, as its name suggests, allows users to plot formulas, see how changes would affect the graphs and predict future outcomes.
“I think it could definitely be useful in businesses, where you could use it to predict the flow of how things will go,” he said. “You can foresee trends of sales and other things like that.”
Hutchinson, a senior along with Bhasvar, said he’s been coding since he was roughly eight years old. He primarily codes games, and considered crafting a game to submit for the competition. However, he said he ultimately decided to do something with more real-world applicability.
For both, it came as a surprise when they learned how well they did.
“I know there are a lot of people who do this, so I was very happy,” Hutchinson said.
For both students, the topics of their projects reflect their plans for the future. Hutchinson said he wants to pursue a career in coding after finishing college, though he isn’t yet sure what type of coding he wants to focus on yet. And Bhasvar said he currently plans to enter the health field after finishing school.
“I think both of them chose some pretty unique and complicated projects, but they both picked something that was personal to them,” Byer said. “I couldn’t be prouder.”
While Bhasvar and Hutchinson brought home some new awards to KWHS, they are the latest in a long line to excel at the Congressional App Challenge. Byer has now had students place in the top 3 of the competition for five straight years.
