When you hear the word hackathon you think of a bunch of computer loving nerds sitting in a dark room typing away on some complex piece of code. Well this is at least what I envisioned when I first heard of a hackathon. Although I had no idea what a hackathon actually was, when my friend asked me to join her hackathon team, I thought, why not! I’ve always loved to code for fun and recently I’ve been wanting to learn to code an app, but never found time to teach myself. However, when I found out that a hackathon actually is a 24 hour coding extravaganza where you and your team work on a coding project nonstop for 24 hours straight, I figured it would be the perfect time to build my first app. To prepare for the hack a thon I went to a short seminar on campus led by Apple on building basic apps. This gave me a beginning understanding of the app making process. Showing up to the hackathon, our team had no idea what we were going to code or even what to expect, but we soon got to work and eventually decided on coding a polynomial root calculator app/game. Our idea was to not only calculate the root of a polynomial, but to also help kids learn how to calculate these roots. So, for around 24 hours straight we worked to code the calculator/game in java on eclipse and then using swift code programmed our ios app. This was all of our team’s first time coding in swift and building an app so it was a huge learning curve. We spent many hours looking at manuals and youtube videos trying to teach ourselves swift code, building our app slowly but surely. In the end, we created a functioning root calculator app, an educational game on java, and a final website for our project. We didn’t win the competition with our idea, but overall I was just glad to finally sit down and learn how to code an app. I can officially call myself an app developer which I think is way cooler than any award we could’ve won.
Our Website: https://parabolicparadise.weebly.com/
