Matthew Dupree (’16), Arthur Dvorkin (’18), and Matthew Li (’17) teamed up and won 1st place out of a couple of hundred high school students passionate about technology and innovation, in the Teen Hackathon held at PayPal’s HQ in San Jose, California from March 21st to March 22nd. The event was sponsored by 18 high-tech Silicon Valley companies including PayPal, Google, Dropbox, Weebly, Texas Instruments and etc.
Teen Hackathon is a 30-hour competition where high school students design and build applications using a designated software framework. Although this was the first time that the OHS team competed in a hackathon, inspired by the creative freedoms of games like Besige and Kerbal Space Program, the team invented an aspiring 3-D educational game, called Aphellion, which aims to immerse the players into the riveting universe of Newtonian Physics by unleashing the players’ inner creativity.
“The 30-hours of non-stop working was both the worst part and the best part of the hackathon,” team members said, “at 6 a.m., we were totally exhausted and had to pinch each other to focus. But, in the end, we were blown away by our aesthetic app built within only 30 hours. How many 30 hours will we have in our life?”