Toycathon 2021 - This was the Hackathon which I probably never ever forget here are the long notes about our ideation to MVP to finally building product to pitching and finally losing.
TLDR;
Codes Repo : https://github.com/Mayank-MP05/molequilizer
Workplace : https://team-molequilizer-notion.surge.sh/
Presentation : shorturl.at/awBF2
5 Jan - @narendra Modi announced the starting of the toycathon on 5 Jan 2021 as it is a national hackathon the response was quite overwhelming there are 14132 teams with almost 132969 users. We have chosen TYCH48( Chemical Reaction Balancing Simulation Learning + Game Problem Statement ) Idea at the start was simple just provide the user with learning material and 2-3 reactions to practice upon.
20 Jan - Idea submitted with the basic prototype video
20 Feb - We are ready with the MVP of some 2-3 reactions and learning materials and results of phase 1 announced and we got selected. It feels wonderful as it's almost a ticket to win at the national level if played right We started working on the product.
[Due to the whole covid thing things started lagging. Finals dates getting postponed.]
In the meantime, we have continued working on the idea and maturing it to its best as well as thinking about how we can better focus on our users. We have added more reactions (Now there are 20 of them) also we worked on making graphics and sound and most imp of all for scalability sake we worked on the feature that user themselves can add new reactions and we successfully implemented that feature.
You can Checkout that version of the product here : https://essentials-6bca6.web.app/
Due to having excess time We also started expanding horizontally in the same domain of chemistry like there is problem statement TYCH50 (Periodic Table And EC Game) we thought it's cool to work on plus its almost under the same domain so we planned the MVP for that and the Quiz game. and we implemented it and it worked out at the start there are some fixed no of quizzes later with randomizer we are able to generate (products of the size of each array in that DB ) combinations which is quite a large no. to practice the quizzes.
23 Jun - We have worked on the touch and feel of the app like we tried to have 2D working animations of the molecules and reactions we are showing on our platform. Animations were good, There are a sufficient number of problems on the platform to practice and we are ready ...... almost.
The product we built is sound from a user perspective but there is not so Indian about it and we are going for a national level hackathon where the "Indian" thing is important. and the Time left now is too little that it's very hard to implement groundbreaking changes. So we tried 3 major things
- Making available our platform in all the major indian regional languages(Translate)
- Adding Analytics to each page so as to track about user(Google analytics)
- Making it available on Desktop, Web as well as mobile(Cordova,Electron)
Here is the final version : https://team-molequilizer.web.app/
24 Jun - So we implemented this all and with all the hopes for winning we presented the product it is the 2-day a long process but we have worked on it for almost 3-4 months roughly and presentations were good (both of them). And the result came and then the sad story starts
Our name was not there in the list and it does not feel good ofc to work on something this hard iteration by iteration and not making it to the winning line. And fortunately or unfortunately I am the team leader so that man-in-charge feels like Whatever goes right or wrong I am responsible for it.
There are no teams selected for TYCH48 maybe because it's not that big of a problem to solve like change India with chemical reactions balancing sounds kind of illogical. Core learning about toycathon is so first is about chasing bigger markets second is about leading the team of 4 people or 400 people, whatever happens, it's leader's responsibility irrespective of things outside of our area of control. Thank you so much harish,Digvijay, Pragati for contribution to building this product and We lost true but We should be grateful for the opportunity and happy for the quality of the product we built