I know it's a bit late, but here is my post for PennApps XXIV, my first ever hackathon. As a high schooler, it is actually quite hard to find collegiate hackathons that I am eligible for. PennApps was a great opportunity to experience an in-person hackathon, as it was only a short drive away. Me and my friend signed up as a team of two, ready to have a good time and expand our coding horizons.

It was a blast - 48 hours on the Penn Engineering campus surrounded by sleep deprived college students, we had to make use of all our past knowledge and experiences. We were pretty ambitious with our project idea, and although it paid off in the end, it didn't help minimize our stress levels. We locked ourselves in an empty classroom, armed with nothing but our laptops and an (un)healthy supply of mountain dew. Except for bathroom and food breaks, we stayed in that room for the duration of the hackathon. The result was a project that we were really happy with: SignSensei, a webapp that teaches you American Sign Language using computer vision to extract pose landmarks from your real hands. It offers an immersive and enjoyable way to learn ASL. Repo is here: https://github.com/purelyboba/SignSensei.

We walked away placing in the top 20 and earning the Wolfram Award. A great achievement and a great experience. We'll be back next year!

opening ceremony

putting our spare monitor to good use

judging