Lynbrook’s First Hackathon!

Just attended Lynbrook’s first ever Hackathon, VikeHacks. And won first place!


It was a lot of fun and I worked with one of my best friends, Marilyn to create “Destress,” an app to help you relax and unwind. Our main goal was to create a lot of different features so that we’d learn something new with every feature we created.


 Breathing: My favorite feature is the “Breathing” one, where we created a catalog of various breathing exercises to help calm you down. We learned about different types of layouts and ways to implement gifs in Android studio.





Feelings: Since the Hackathon was sponsored by IBM’s Bluemix Watson project, we wanted to try and use the Speech-to-Text and Tonal Analysis processes provided by them in our “Feelings” portion of the app. We wanted the allow the user to say something and have the app save a tone, or emotion for that statement. Then, if the app is used regularly, over time the user could see how their tone has changed. Unfortunately, since neither of us had ever used such a complex API before, we weren’t able to successfully implement this section. We still learned a lot about APIs and SDKs though!

Messages: In the end, we still pulled through in using a different API to generate a happy message every 24 hours for the “Messages” feature of the app.

Notifications: And we learned about launch activities when we created the “Notifications” features which launches to the Settings app on the user’s phone so they can manage their notifications.

Sounds: Lastly, the “Sounds” portion creates calming sounds to relax the user.

I’m really proud of our work and Marilyn and I tied with another team for 1st place!

(Marilyn had to leave before they announced winners--wish she was up there wish me!)

We both won an Amazon Echo Dot.




I’m super excited to start using it and the best part is, Amazon even has an API for Alexa, so I can continue coding and experiment using it!


Check out the project on DevPost here: https://devpost.com/software/destress-unexwy


_______edit______
Also! Lynbrook wrote an article about it which you can see here:
https://lhsepic.com/631/news/lynbrook-hosts-first-ever-hackathon/




Location: 1280 Johnson Ave, San Jose, CA 95129, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Girls Who Code Summer Camp

Image
A lot of hard work!  Me and my fellow Girl Who Code officers have decided to hold a Summer Camp for girls in 4th through 6th grade. And of course, as president, this means I have had a lot of work to do. So many things had to be taken care of: How should we advertise and promote publicity? Where can we book a place with 50 computers? When should we hold it--what time and dates? How much should we teach? What topics should we cover? How do we explain these topics to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders? It took a lot of hard work, late nights, and determination, but we've planned nearly everything out! Here's a flyer I designed with my officer team and created on my own (with Photoshop): This was a lot of work! I'm really proud of how much we've accomplished and I will update more on how the camp goes.
Read more

On Volunteering, Optimizing Metrics, and more

Image
This winter break I volunteered at the Southern California Vipassana Center in Joshua Tree near LA. On being free: I've done a couple of 10-day meditation retreats in the past through the Vipassana Organization and the neat thing is that it is completely free. Not even that it's a non-profit, but actually free . You don't pay for your room, the facilities, the food, heat, water, the volunteer's labor, the teachers' labor, anything . The entire organization is run purely on donations and volunteering. And on top of that, only accepts donations from people who have completed a 10-day retreat. There's no giant wealthy philanthropist, no big government institution that supporting the Vipassana Organization. Every cent is donated by people who truly want to help and support others in their meditation. If you're wondering why people are so dedicated to this, I would honestly suggest taking a 10-day course yourself. It truly is something best learned abo...
Read more