## Inspiration

We were recently introduced to the world of Explorable Explanations (by Nicky Case!) and were immediately enthralled by its educating yet engaging nature. Inspired, we decided to present the concept of quantum mechanics to better engage the youth who have not yet encountered this phenomenon in class.

## What it does

The code that we built is a web page for educational purposes. It talks about the applications and different phenomena of Quantum physics in a very simple way so that even high school students can understand it clearly. The webpage contains simple animations for demonstrations of the phenomena.

## How I built it

We built the webpage using HTML and CSS and created small animations using Javascript and an open-source library (EaselJS and TweenJS from create.js).

## Challenges I ran into

Jennifer: Working through the eye strain! I had some experience with HTML and CSS prior to this hackathon, but having to relearn the basics and take on a completely new language (Javascript) was an incredible challenge. From the numerous crash courses consumed to the constant research and debugging I’ve had to do in the past two days, I realized just how different of a language Javascript is compared to my experience with Python.

Karen: As a beginner programmer, trying to learn coding was a huge challenge. I had limited knowledge with HTML, and no experience with CSS or JavaScript; the latter being the most difficult to understand! This hackathon was also my first concrete experience with programming and also an introduction to software development as a whole. Debugging was also a pain.

Yudi: I have never dealt with a front-end language before. In my past experience, I have only worked with C and python, and software like MATLAB. Learning three languages in a short amount of time was the biggest challenge that I have. Our team decided on the topic and language the night before the hack, and all three of us binge-watched loads of Youtube crash courses. This was also my very first hackathon experience!

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Jennifer: Having actually learned and implemented a new programming language in such a short time span. There were many things on our page that I thought we wouldn’t be able to accomplish. It was an absolute pain trying to create our small animations and there were many times where I felt like giving up. We also played around with user input (and created an unrelated drawing game on the side)! But in the end, I’m proud of all the work we’ve done and for continuing to persevere through our many hurdles. As simple as our web page may be, it was the result of a lot of hard work and it was a great learning experience for all of us!

Karen: In preparation for this hackathon, I attempted to learn three languages over the course of a few days. Software development was always an intimidating field to me, but I am proud to be able to understand the basics of coding - even though I’m only familiar with three languages thus far. As a non-STEM student, coding is something I’m glad to have pursued!

Yudi: I was kind of frustrated that I didn’t understand some of the things that were going on, but in the latter half of the hack, I was able to overcome some of the confusion. Although I felt I haven’t contributed that much to the team, I did learn a lot; not just from the crash courses, but also from my teammates. We had many things that we had to clarify and google, but in the end, we grit our teeth and pull through.

## What I learned

Jennifer: I hate semicolons and have a new appreciation for Javascript. I also learned that centering divs is unnecessarily painful and have fallen in love with documentations. As well, I learned about my dire need for caffeinated chocolate and miss it dearly. On a more serious note, I learned a lot about web development! Javascript is a more flexible language that I had anticipated and its capabilities astounded me. As I struggled to stay awake, I tried to deploy our page to the web and it somehow worked (thanks Surge).

Karen: Beyond understanding the basics of coding, I also familiarized myself with the work culture surrounding software development. The community is incredibly talented and ambitious, which instills fear within me.

Yudi: I observed that humans work incredibly fast and efficient under pressure :) I really appreciate how the three languages come together so smoothly. But then again, I need to learn more about all these three languages to use them fluently. Through this experience, I realized how little I know about coding, and how vast and versatile this field actually is.

## What's next for A Brief Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

As we work on our Javascript, HTML, and CSS knowledge, we can further develop this website to be more interactive and pretty. In addition, we can add other topics to the web page.
## Inspiration

Looking around you in your day-to-day life you see so many people eating so much food. Trust me, this is going somewhere. All that stuff we put in our bodies, what is it? What are all those ingredients that seem more like chemicals that belong in nuclear missiles over your 3 year old cousins Coke? Answering those questions is what we set out to accomplish with this project. But answering a question doesn't mean anything if you don't answer it well, meaning your answer raises as many or more questions than it answers. We wanted everyone, from pre-teens to senior citizens to be able to understand it. So in summary of what we wanted to do, we wanted to give all these lazy couch potatoes (us included) an easy, efficient, and most importantly, comprehendible method of knowing what it is exactly that we're consuming by the metric ton on a daily basis.

## What it does

What our code does is that it takes input either in the form of text or image, and we use it as input for an API from which we extract our final output using specific prompts. Some of our outputs are the nutritional values, a nutritional summary, the amount of exercise required to burn off the calories gained from the meal, (its recipe), and its health in comparison to other foods.

## How we built it

Using Flask, HTML,CSS, and Python for backend.

## Challenges we ran into

We are all first-timers so none of us had any idea as to how the whole thing worked, so individually we all faced our fair share of struggles with our food, our sleep schedules, and our timidness, which led to miscommunication.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making it through the week and keeping our love of tech intact. Other than that we really did meet some amazing people and got to know so many cool folks. As a collective group, we really are proud of our teamwork and ability to compromise, work with each other, and build on each others ideas. For example we all started off with different ideas and different goals for the hackathon but we ended up all managing to find a project we all liked and found it in ourselves to bring it to life.

## What we learned

How hackathons work and what they are. We also learned so much more about building projects within a small team and what it is like and what should be done when our scope of what to build was so wide.

## What's next for NutriScan

-Working ML
-Use of camera as an input to the program
-Better UI
-Responsive
-Release
## Inspiration

In online documentaries, we saw visually impaired individuals and their vision consisted of small apertures. We wanted to develop a product that would act as a remedy for this issue.

## What it does

When a button is pressed, a picture is taken of the user's current view. This picture is then analyzed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and the text is extracted from the image. The text is then converted to speech for the user to listen to.

## How we built it

We used a push button connected to the GPIO pins on the Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c. The input is taken from the button and initiates a python script that connects to the Azure Computer Vision API. The resulting text is sent to the Azure Speech API.

## Challenges we ran into

Coming up with an idea that we were all interested in, incorporated a good amount of hardware, and met the themes of the makeathon was extremely difficult. We attempted to use Speech Diarization initially but realized the technology is not refined enough for our idea. We then modified our idea and wanted to use a hotkey detection model but had a lot of difficulty configuring it. In the end, we decided to use a pushbutton instead for simplicity in favour of both the user and us, the developers.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our very first Makeathon and we were proud of accomplishing the challenge of developing a hardware project (using components we were completely unfamiliar with) within 24 hours. We also ended up with a fully function project.

## What we learned

We learned how to operate and program a DragonBoard, as well as connect various APIs together.

## What's next for Aperture

We want to implement hot-key detection instead of the push button to eliminate the need of tactile input altogether.