April 16th, 2023: ANova Hacks 2023, Day 2

Like yesterday, today was pretty stressful.

Im still at ANova Hacks 2023 working on our project. We gave up on ReactJS since we didn't really know what to do with it and how to continue it. I did some research at the start when we were brainstorming and found libGDX, a Java library for game development. Initially, we were making a lot of progress by following the simple game tutorial on their website. We were able to place sprites onto the screen, which was a lot better than when we were using ReactJS. However, our first (and final) roadblock that we encountered was displaying text, which was critical for our game since it was easiest to create random equations. There was a textfield method we could use, but we weren't able to get it working after 3 hours of debugging and research. At this point, it's 3:00 AM, and one of my friends had gone to sleep. We abandoned using the textfield method and went to creating a text engine by making each sprite a character and placing it. There were so many issues with this, like what if we needed multiple sprite because there were going to be multiple of the same number in the same equation? Anyways, this failed pretty quickly because of all of the copy and pasting we had to do. At this point, at 7:00 (5 hours of debugging!) we abandoned creating this sprite-text display, and as a whole, we abandoned using libGDX. It was also at this point that the textfield method did not work on HTML, which was what we wanted our game to be on because it was going to be easiest to pull up the game anywhere.

At 7:00, we had no choice but to move forward with making the game with Scratch. The time to get to the point where we were on libGDX only took about 10 minutes on Scratch. After that, we were making lots of progress with our game, and managed to finish it. One of my friends created the website on Github Pages for the frame of the website, while I worked on the game, and our other teammate worked on the presentation for our game, which really carried the entire project. After 5 hours, we were able to finish it and present it. 

During award ceremony, we were honored and extremely excited to with the "Best Education" award, for our project being able to more easily educate people. We were honestly very happy about this, we didn't expect it at all! A lot of other projects were also educational, but they won their awards in other tracks. 

Overall, ANova Hacks 2023 really re-ignited my passion for project creation. I learnt so many things and new resources for programming. It was a really fun experience, and we really hope to join the hackathon next year with better planning skills and higher asperations! It was also a really tiring experience, since I stayed up for over 36-ish hours. That night, I slept at 7 for almost 13 hours.

Thanks for reading,
Issac