Cold Spring Harbor HS Students Win Prestigious National Award: 'We Are Extremely Proud'

COLD SPRING HARBOR, NY — A team of talented students from Cold Spring Harbor High School, including juniors Milan Lustig and Ryan Smith and seniors Buster Coden and Desmond Mehta, was chosen as the winning team of the Congressional App Challenge for New York District 1, the school district announced.

"Congratulations to these amazing and talented students," Superintendent Jill M. Gierasch said in a news release. "We are extremely proud of their outstanding achievement and national recognition which is a source of pride to our school district and community."

The team, which entered this prestigious national competition in October 2023, successfully designed and built an app that allows residents of Suffolk County to quickly check the water quality in their local rivers, harbors and bays. The app, which uses ReactJS and Leaflet, displays an interactive map with several points representing the United States Geological Survey water-monitoring sites across Suffolk County. Live data is then queried from these stations and analyzed before an overall rating of the water quality at that location is displayed to the user.

The name of the app is "Safe Water Operation." The app is in an early beta stage and is not yet published publicly, but the team is hoping to have a final version published by April.

The team will be visiting Congress in Washington, D.C. on April 10 and 11 to present their app in person at the #HouseOfCode Science Fair. While visiting Washington, the students will have the opportunity to interact with many members of Congress and other winning students during what is described as the most prestigious demo day in STEM and the new national science fair.