At the start of this year, school was going fine for me. I was beginning to re-learn programming, and was more interested in it than the year before. Within a few weeks of school, our school was told about a group called Skills USA. I was resistant to joining at first, because it seemed fun, but also seemed like too much work for me. My teacher pushed me on to join the group, even if I didn’t want to that much. I joined, and waited awhile before anything really happened within the group.
After joining Skills USA, I learned about how it works, its point in existing, and a little about what it does. Since I joined, I learned about the competition I was to be entering with Joshua Evans. We practiced to be competing for about two weeks, and moved onto other things later on. Whenever we finally went on to compete, we were confident we could win. We spent about half an hour waiting to get going to the other school, where the competition was taking place. After the bus arrived, and our supervisor was there, we boarded the bus and we took a ride over. The bus ride over to the other school took about an hour, and was uneventful, to say the least. When we arrived at the other school, we went inside and signed in, and waited in their cafeteria to be called down for our competition. There was another person with us from our school, competing in computer applications. We all went into the competition room, and started reading over the guidelines of what our work was meant to be like.
The other kid in computer applications finished his competition in half an hour, with only two other competitors, and promptly left to wander around the school, while we stayed and worked on our website for the competition. The work we started out with was slow, and didn’t look very flashy, and the only other team sounded like they were having some minor trouble starting out as well. To start, I made images for the website. Even if it were only four images total, it took me about two hours to get all of it done, with the basic imagery program available to us, MS Paint. The code we wrote was organized, we thought, and was full of the details we had to use to make the website fit the guidelines given to us. After 3½ hours of work on our competition, we finished and went back to the cafeteria to wait for our bus. The bus ride back to our school was slightly eventful, seeming as how we were more awake than in the morning, hours before. Arriving back at the school, we went to class and awaited the results of our competition, that day and the weekend following. Although the other team supposedly won, they didn’t completely follow the guidelines, and resulted in a stalemate of the results, ending in a vote for whom won the competition. The results are still a mystery to us, so, this is to be continued.