First of all, the title to this is obviously misleading. I haven’t learned everything. Nobody has. But these projects taught me how to be a better learner, and how to work my way through complex problems.

Intro

Ever since I grew up, my hobbies were primarily making stuff with technology. Whether it was troubleshooting errors for my family, or setting up a Minecraft server for my friends, I always enjoyed tinkering around and learning more about computers and what makes them work.

When I turned around 7, I started to write code. I remember, my first project was attempting to create a cheat for the game Club Penguin in Visual Basic. Despite it not working, I stuck to Visual Basic, creating little math games and cool programs that weren’t really that useful.

But I learned. I learned a lot. And most importantly, it’s something I’ve enjoyed.

10 years later, I’ve moved on to writing real code, for actual uses, and I still get the same happy feeling when I compile my program and it finally passes all checks, the same feeling I get when I finally get that React text-editor to work, and that’s a feeling that’ll never subside, because for me, project-based learning is something I can never get enough of.

Projects

The QHSS Times

Releasing this September, here are a few screenshots

To learn web development, I made a news frontend paired with a content management system. I never had much experience with ‘fancy’ frontend frameworks like React and Next.JS, but with enough skimming through documentation, I was able to gain a grasp on how to create a full, functioning website.

Some background: my school has a pretty big censorship issue, so towards the end of the year I developed this in hopes that it allows for “freedom of press,” within schools.

NYC COVID Tracker

https://github.com/Hypercoded/NYCSchoolsCOVIDTracker/tree/main/data_collection

One day, sitting in my class, I had the idea of creating a better COVID stats tracker for schools. NYC Schools had a very hard to use, laggy, website, and I wanted to collect data on schools and their COVID stats, to be displayed on a Discord bot.

Obviously, scraping the data for thousands of schools in NYC was out of the question. I realized, obviously, that this website has to get its data from somewhere, right?

After digging through Chrome’s Network Profiler, I found the holy grail, the NYC health API! I started tinkering around with it, opening the results in JSON prettifiers and attempting to decipher how it worked. Through trial and error, I was able to write a program which gathered API data and aggregated it to a MongoDB database for later analysis/display.

A World Without Time

Obviously, as a primarily CS-oriented student, humanities really isn’t my thing. My teacher then assigned a daunting task for our AP English Language final:

Create a world without clocks, and then describe what happens when clocks are introduced.

Despite being pretty bad at writing, I loved coming up with new ideas for fictional worlds and stories. I immediately thought of using Minecraft, a game I’ve enjoyed for so long, to create the visuals. The game itself looks pretty bland and boring, but I decided to use fancy shaders to make it look fancy.

I went to work, both building a Minecraft world in game that replicated the fictional world I had in mind, and building a script, which represented the storyline I had in mind.

Here’s a link to the final product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ48UT-BnFs

This project taught me so much. From time management, to understanding what a realistic script looks like, to color correction. I truly loved every bit of this project. I got to experiment with different camera angles, using music to tell a story, and so much more.

Looking back, this project was extremely hacked together, and there’s so much more I could’ve done to improve it, but that’s just the nature of learning and growing.

Sometimes you look back, and realize “wow! this is garbage!”

But I like to think that to get where I am now, I had to make that garbage, and that the things I create now are just a stepping stone to making less garbage videos.

“The Timer”

https://youtu.be/kP9gNWAus_4 https://github.com/Hypercoded/TheTimer

Messing around with the Youtube API, I created a ‘social experiment’ which was a countdown timer that gained time whenever someone watched the video. When the countdown hit 0, the video would be made unlisted. Not much to it, just I did learn a LOT about how the Youtube API worked, and most importantly, how MongoDB worked.