Meet Advaith, ISD seventh grader and coding whizz, whose augmented reality game, Blink Board, was judged best in its category at this year’s global HackTable hackathon.
HackTable is an online hackathon, designed to give students of all ages and coding abilities the opportunity to pursue STEM pathways and connect with like-minded people from all over the world.
This year’s challenge was to address a problem that has arisen due to the current global pandemic.
Advaith had noticed that people were spending more time than usual staring at screens and mobile devices, with the result being dry, sore eyes. After some research into eye health, Advaith’s solution was to develop a game that gets people blinking!
Blink Board is an augmented reality game, where players must blink in order for their character (a skateboarder) to jump obstacles and earn points.
Entries were rated on ‘business value’, ‘coolness’, ‘realistic capability’ and ‘level of innovation’, by a judging panel including senior managers from Microsoft, Google and Tesla.
His unique approach to a modern-day problem saw Advaith winning the ‘Best Beginner Hack’ category, against competition from around the world.
No newcomer to coding competitions, Advaith won his first hackathon at 10 years of age. The prize was $250 cash, which he unhesitatingly gave to his proud mum and dad. This year’s prize was awarded in resources, which Advaith will use to further develop his coding skills.
As for the future, his plans include learning more programming languages, and developing deep-fake and voice-cloning software – although he promises he will only use his programming superpowers for good!
For details of Advaith’s winning entry, see here.
