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Possibility starts here.
Inspiration
Our group realized that students in high school, and especially ones approaching grade 12, don't have a sense of what they want to do. With the constant stress of finding a 'good job', peer pressure from parents, and global stresses, students are so overwhelmed with the future already planned out for them, they never stop to consider what they truly want to do. We created a tool to help solve just that.
What it does
This tool helps high school students explore potential careers based on their interests, personality and work habits.
How we built it
Given this was our first coding project outside of school, we were entirely unsure of where to start. To start, we relied on YouTube videos, consulted websites like GeeksforGeeks and Google, and AI llm to help us understand the skeleton of the website we were building.
Challenges we ran into
Originally, we created this tool using Python in VS Code, Streamlit, and Flask. However, after hours of tireless issues that we didn't have the knowledge to solve, we decided to covert our coding language to HTML and make the necessary code translations using further help from Google and AI llm's. After a gruelling afternoon learning HTML, deciphering errors, and truly understanding why people CS as 'hard', we encountered our first major success! Our website ran.
This took us to part two, creating the quiz. This proved to be the hardest part, our code at one point being +1700 lines of repeating if/else if with half as many errors. We did not let this deter us though, and after a gruelling 18h coding session consisting of many YouTube videos, llm conversations, and prayer, we emerged mostly victorious!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Signing up was a challenge as none of our groups members truly understood what a Hackathon was. Pushing through fear was the first step. The next step was learning where to go to ask for help and how to even go about creating the tangible version of a goal we had in our heads. After that step came persevering through errors, frustration, and confusion. But we took each step because we had a goal entering this project; to learn. If you asked us on Friday whether we possessed the knowledge and stamina to build a website, the answer would have definitely been a know. Now? You'd probably hear a sigh followed by a cry, but somewhere in that noise you'd hear something like a 'maybe.' And for a first ever non-academic coding experiment, that's an accomplishment in of itself.
What we learned
We learned how much work and different people go into building something as common as a website. We learned a bit about the types of people we become at 3am still debugging the same error from 3pm. We worked through numerous challenges, and while our understanding of how isn't yet concrete, nothing can take away our dedication, collaboration, or our creation.
No matter how confusing something is at first, there are resources out there to help. And always save your code to a supplemental file periodically when you're using LiveShare in VS Code.
What's next for OpenDoors
We've created a basic tool, but there are still questions that remain unanswered. 'How specifically do I get to this career?' 'What might happen on the journey?' While these questions, like many in life, aren't entirely answerable, the key of OpenDoors is to show that possibility starts here.
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