Inspiration
First ever hack, learning using code academy as I went along. Wanted to produce a website that allowed anybody to do a magic trick with very little practice. Work as a professional magician, and want to change my answer after I perform from, 'sorry, I can't tell you how I did that' to 'here's something that you can learn'.
What it does
It's an online magic trick. Read the instructions page first if you are using it. A person thinks of a card, or three people (one picks the colour, one picks the suit, one picks the value), they can change their mind as much as they want and you do not influence their decision. Whatever they say, when you click on the link a picture of their chosen card comes up.
How I built it
I used the code academy tutorial to learn how to initially write the basic code structure in html and css. Then I learnt how to put in the appropriate images and links onto the page, and on each letter. Didn't know what software to put the code that I had written into, so I just coded into the text file on my wordpress website on a new page. Started by coming up with a set of words that could be split into 4 instructions, to represent the four suits, with 13 characters in each instruction (minus spaces) to represent the 13 potential card values in each suit. Then coded each individual letter to correspond to each playing card (this took the bulk of the time as I had to attach an image link to every letter). I then reformatted all the information so that it was in one line as a sentence and added a title. Created a new instructions page and added a link to that. Then coded in the pictures and links, as well as centre lining the text and making it look nice. Finally I added a link from the instructions to my website (not coded during the hackathon), because... why not right?
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge I faced was convincing myself to start learning to code, then it was ensuring that all of the code was formatted and the website looked nice. Coming up with the word combination was difficult, as was ensuring that the link looked as much like one single hyperlink as possible.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Finally got around to learning to code, and am now looking forward to working on many more exciting projects. Also proud to have come up with the idea and then gone on to execute it. Proud that it was all written in actual code rather than just editing the words on wordpress as I usually do with my website.
What I learned
How to use html/css. How to create headings, change font sizes, import images, add hyperlinks, add image hyperlinks, reformat code to become one sentence, work continuously for a few hours without procrastinating.
What's next for Online Magic Trick - Amaze Your Friends
Definitely going to design some more magic tricks that people can do for their friends using the platform. Hope to make them even better and far more difficult to figure out. Maybe also mix coding with some real life magic tricks. Also hope to do a psychology page where people can take part in experiments (eg. implicit association tests) to see if they have implicit biases and how they compare to the rest of the population.
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