Participating in the one and only hackathon at the high school level in Korea, I was genuinely honored to have been surrounded by such hardworking professionals who had the innate drive for programming and coding, regardless of their skill level.

 

The fact that Seoul Hackathon was an all-inclusive environment with varying coding proficiency levels actually enabled me, and fellow contestants to incessantly challenge ourselves with higher-level work. The logic behind that assertion lies in that creativity can sometimes be generated in the underlying presence of "not knowing too much", ironically. And although I was an experienced coder, working with those who weren't as adept in the field of coding helped our team produce more out-of-the-box ideas that weren't merely a result of training.

 

I think that is where I was able to learn how to go beyond my previous knowledge of coding design and really let myself explore unprecedented designs and techniques. For example, creating a quiz application about Mandarin tone markers for foreigners required visual patterns to be incorporated into the program. Visual representations were best done when combines with auditorial examples, so that is how I came up with the idea to combine the two. Also, when creating the Help Grandpa application (an educational application designed to teach the elderly how to use popular online meeting platforms), my team designed the front end of the application blue and green, as research showed that these colors were good for the eyesight of the elderly. This was such a creative idea that I couldn't have come up with alone. Moreover, based on the prior coding, experiences, and know-hows that me and my teammates had, we were able to display all the functions that we planned beforehand within the time limit.

These were some of the functions that we presented:

• Including functions (onEvents) in order to make sure that the user clicks on a button to go to the next screen

• Utilizing functions (getText) so that the computer could operate well whenever the user puts an input

• Utilizing if/else statements in the quiz section, so that when the user clicks on the 'correct' button, the score will become available and the question count variable will go up by 1

 

Reflecting back on the two competitions, I could also remember the moments when me and my team ran into challenges. Amongst the different technical issues, 'management' was the trickiest. While programming the application, we had to manage 28 different screens simultaneously. Therefore, it was difficult to ensure that all the button IDs and screen IDs were following a consistent pattern and were distinct from one another. Furthermore, utilizing functions and variables in Javascript was very stressful too, as it was such a time-consuming process.

Nevertheless, participating in these two coding competitions meant a lot to me. Not only because me and my team achieved successful accomplishments and won awards, but also because they gave me experiences that I couldn't have earned if I worked alone, at home. Specifically speaking, I learned how to cooperate with my teammates efficiently by assigning different roles, and also got to enhance my understanding of creating a user-friendly application by learning how to target the right audience and execute the main purpose of the application.

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