We have been working with STEM Launch in Thornton, Colorado to try to solve a problem in Science teaching. The week before the hackathon, we finally defined the pain point. The problem is on how to teach Erosion and Deposition, part of Earth Science subject. Typically teacher will use water table, such as in this video. It may take days for the preparation, and then minutes for the experiment. It also tends to be messy so that it discourage the usage of this approach. Unfortunately this will cause the hands-on activity missed out in the learning process.
After the meeting, my partner and I discussed how to solve this problem, and suddenly a light bulb moment sparked. We are going to Intel IOT Hackathon, and we can pitch this idea. We figured out what kind of sensors that we can add, such as gyroscope to sense the inclination.
I pitched this idea of Education Technology to teach Erosion lesson. Five minutes .. ten minutes .. half an hour .. nobody approached me. Even three folks from my table left (okay, they probably just came to get the free Intel Edison kit, as I didn't see them anymore throughout the event). Hmm .. I started doubting myself that this may not be a good idea. But I decided to charge ahead and approached some folks to join my team. Four folks joined my team, all newbies and I was the only developer. Although all of them are smart folks, and all contributed to the completion of the project. In retrospect, after the events couple of people came to me and mentioned they actually considering to join my team. So the lesson here is "Don't give up if you don't see any sign/feedback immediately"
The steepest learning curve is to acquire the knowledge on node.js as a webserver. I have used other web server prior to this, but have not touched node.js and minimally used javascript. After unsuccessful attempt to reuse the sample code on Saturday, I decided to start my Sunday at 5 am to do crash course on node.js. This tutorial and the nodejs documentation assisted me through the early morning class on node.js. By 9 am, I understood how it works, had some code - still buggy, and joined my team back at University of Denver.
It was final 2 hours, the application is still not working. I started thinking that we are fighting the wrong battle since the problem is in understanding how node.js works, not in the hardware or the sensor. Finally in desperation I went back to the template code and made the modification one at a time. Around 12:30 pm the code finally worked ... phew, and for the next hour we added the rest of the functionalities back. The hardware portion is so smooth thanks to one of the team member (Sir James Fleit), that it is a matter of copy and paste the code and they just worked. Half an hour before the deadline we have all functionalities worked and tested, and I was totally exhausted. After several tests, we decided to stop tinkering and waited for the final bell.
We are team number 11 out of 13 teams. During the presentation I checked out the body language of the judges and they seemed already exhausted and uninterested, and we only got 1 question. I thought this is not a good sign. So I was totally blown when we were announced to win the third place. One of the judge later stopped by and asked us about other product that we have created. This is really adding conviction to myself that what we are doing is in the right direction. I came home physically tired but mentally ready to continue the journey.
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