April 15th, 2023: ANova Hacks 2023, Day 1

Today was a stressful day.

This morning I got ready for ANova Hacks 2023. I switched from using a backpack to using a suitcase, and arrived there through our amazing teacher, Mr. K.

At 3:40, we arrived to Trellis, where ANova Hacks 2023 was hosted. They greeted hackers and were very kind. I got settled by placing my belongings and settling in with my team. They gave us all macbooks, which I didn't use since I wanted to remote into my home PC using teamviewer on my school's chromebook. Our team consisted of one of my friends who changed schools and one of his friends who is still at my school. Then, after the opening ceremony which showed us all the important introductory information, and the career panel which gave us insight of real-world STEM jobs, we got started with brainstorming.

Initially, we wanted to create an education game to go along with the education track. The game that we wanted to make was a game where a student could answer a math equation to progress with a game. The main game aspect would be to climb a slope, and answering the math equation would break down the barriers to reach the top of the slope. Then, we decided with the library/framework/programming language that we wanted to use. Two of us were decently comfortable with Java, and the other was comfortable with Javascript. The mentors showed us ReactJS, which we first used.

Before hacking, we learnt what we could use for our project with the workshops that they started. We joined the Web Development and App Development workshops and took notes for each other. The Web Development workshop gave insight on the basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, which was pretty useful. The App Development workshop showed and introduction to Thunkable, which was like code.org and Scratch combined together.

After listening to the workshops, we began working on our project with ReactJS. It was pretty confusing since none of us were exactly comfortable with ReactJS. We tried modifying the app.js file, but we didn't fully understand how to get started. After 5 hours, and at that point it was 12:00, we moved on to something different.

Since it's 12:00 AM, the rest of my blog about ANova Hacks will have to continue in tommorow's blog.

Thanks for reading,
Issac