Advice from a HW7 Winning Team: Dance Party
The Team:
Matthew Danics: (UWO) Computer Science & HBA
David George: (UWO) Computer Science & HBA
Vaskar Nath: (UofT) Computer Science & Mathematics
Jenny Song: (UWO) Software Engineering & HBA
What is Dance Party?
Dance Party is a web conferencing application, which assigns points to users who follow the dance leader, the closest. The application makes use of pose detection and draws a rigid body skeleton on each connected member, comparing the similarity of the poses on a scale 0 to 1 and gives points accordingly.
What was the inspiration for it?
Jenny: The actual idea behind Dance Party was something David was thinking of working on over the summer as a personal project, but decided against it. His inspiration for it was Just Dance — it’s on console, why not bring that to computers?!
Did you consider other ideas before settling on Dance Party, and how close did the end product get to what you had in mind?
Jenny and David: We considered quite a few ideas around mental health — we were really aiming to win the Telus [Leverage Technology to Manage/Improve any Mental Health Related Issue] award. The idea for Dance Party seemed really cool and after some discussion, it was clear it was technically feasible as well. After settling on it, everything from feature specification to eventual implementation was kept to the original scope we had in mind, and Dance Party never changed.
What was your biggest challenge, and proudest achievement from Dance Party?
David: The biggest challenge, by far, was incorporating all of the parts together. After hours of debugging it was incredibly satisfying to see everything just…work. It’s hard to describe the feeling of abstractly planning out an idea, drawing up app architecture, and going from a lofty goal to an actual working demo. Getting the damn thing working and dancing as a group altogether — this was our proudest achievement.
What was the experience of a virtual hackathon like?
David: It was fire, I loved it. No distractions, I could walk over to my fridge and drink some orange juice while debugging, it was just too nice. Also the hack western organizing team was/is overpowered and they did an exceptional job making it run smoothly.
Jenny: I definitely would have preferred an in-person hackathon. I think it’s just easier to interact with different teams, but working through a virtual hackathon was also awesome because we got to see more competitors from a diverse set of backgrounds.
What was your favourite part of HW7 outside of coding?
David: To be totally honest, we more or less spent our entire time coding — debugging right up to the deadline. In the small pockets of time we weren’t coding we were literally dancing to test out our hack, which at the time was NOT FUN considering it was like 4 am. However, in hindsight it was hilarious.
Jenny: I think a fun part of hackathons is brainstorming and coming up with ideas at the start. It’s a lot of fun to get to know your team and brainstorm some crazy ideas.
What was your favourite hack from other teams?
David: My favourite hack was G.E.O.R.G.E for two reasons. 1) I think the name of their hack was frankly excellent (heheheh) 2) Their UI was clean and simple, which is something really hard to do especially in a hackathon type competition with a tight deadline.
Jenny: I really liked Peak PerFARMance. I thought it was an interesting take on an issue I never thought about before. The design of their interface was friendly and it looked easy enough to interact with the product.
Do you have any general advice for HW8 competitors?
To win a hackathon here is what your project needs:
- Technical Complexity: It’s a hackathon at the end of the day, it should be technical. It can be hacky and buggy but don’t be afraid to be ambitious
- Something that is easy to understand/describe (this helps for the pitching part) + highly visual.
- Strong, coherent presentation: Make it clear the problem your hack addresses is solved by your team’s project. Make sure to incorporate ethos, logos and pathos into your presentation.
Bonus: Have a strong team, with a distinct skill set if possible. Work on your own projects in your free time, recycle code from your projects where possible for boilerplate stuff. HAVE FUN, don’t go overboard and jeopardize your health with too many red bulls and too little sleep.
