HackOHI/O 2018
From 7:00am on Saturday October 27th until approximately 6:00 am on Sunday October 28th I was in the Ohio Union ballroom with about 800 other students from all over the country coding and working to create high-tech solutions to challenges given by large scale companies.
I created a team with some of my friends from my computer science engineering Java class, and we worked all night. The beginning of the day went by very quickly. Enterprises such as Honda, Chase, and even the Ohio State environmental council first presented their challenges. Then we, the students, got time to brainstorm ideas and decide whether we wanted to try to build a solution for one of the companies or if we simply wanted to build something else (like a game) on our own.
My friend Annabelle and I decided we wanted to use this time to further learn about the functions of Java, so we chose to build the game Mastermind while other people in my group got a start on the layout of how to create a program that uses algorithms to detect fake news. The start of the Mastermind project went very smoothly. We used our knowledge from class to create methods and an outline for the game. This only took about an hour. However, it took about more 8 hours, much research, determination, and some expertise from a Google worker to work out a single issue in the code. The expert fixed our problem using a technique we have not learned yet, which made me feel better about not getting it right away, and made me happy to learn something new.
Although this is much longer than I would have ever expected to work on a game, I can truly say I learned so much from that experience. Despite the frustration, I never gave up. I didn’t ask for help from an expert until I had exhausted every other idea in my head and option on the table. The satisfaction of the game working properly now makes all that time and effort worth it.
HackOHI/O 2018 was a fantastic experience, and I cannot wait to do it again next year, and see what I learn then.