Description

Engineer the Future in Your Classroom with the Educator Arduino Scholarship

The Congressional App Challenge invites educators to apply for the Engineering the Future: Educator Arduino Scholarship powered by Qualcomm, a national opportunity to help students build apps that connect code to the real world.
 
Selected educators will receive 5–30 Arduino® UNO™ Q boards to distribute to students participating in the 2026 Congressional App Challenge. These boards can help students move beyond the screen and create hardware-enabled projects using sensors, data, automation, and physical computing.

Requirements

The Congressional App Challenge and Qualcomm Incorporated today announced Engineering the Future: Educator Arduino Scholarship, a new national initiative to expand access to physical computing tools for middle and high school students participating in the Congressional App Challenge. Through the program, educators across the country can apply for sets of Arduino® UNO™ Q boards, enabling students to build hands-on, hardware-enabled projects that connect software to real-world applications, from environmental monitoring and health tracking to assistive technology and community-based solutions.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. acquired Arduino in October 2025 to empower students, educators, and developers by facilitating access to its unmatched portfolio of edge technologies and products. The Arduino UNO Q is a newly released board that helps enable students to bring code into the physical world. This is done by connecting software to sensors, lights, motors, and other components, supporting interactive projects that help students design, test, and iterate real systems while learning core hardware and coding skills.

Many students participating in the Challenge have strong ideas and technical ability but limited access to hardware. This scholarship is designed to address that gap by placing tools directly in student hands where educators can guide them from concept through working prototypes. The scholarship prioritizes under-resourced and rural schools, expanding access to opportunities that allow students to build, test, and iterate on real systems using Edge AI. Arduino boards are also heavily used in industries such as automotive, aerospace and IOT to help prototype and commercialize products, providing the foundation for students to gain highly valuable skills that directly transfer into industry.

The program is delivered in collaboration with the Congressional App Challenge, the official coding competition of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the largest high school coding competition in the country. Each year, the Challenge engages nearly 14,000 students across all 50 states, and all Arduino UNO Q boards awarded through this scholarship will support students or teams preparing to submit an app, ensuring the tools are tied directly to real projects and outcomes.