Dozing off, Jennifer Raymon almost fell off her seat as they were calling out the winners for the State Farm expo computer science competition. Her team, CONfident, had moved on to the final four, but only three teams win. After not being called for both third and second place, Jennifer and her team assumed the worst.

“And first place goes to, CONfident,” the emcee announced. Raymon’s whole team sprang up from their seats, confused but excited as they went up the stage to grab iPads awarded to the winning teams.

“When they announced it, I wasn’t expecting it even though I was expecting it a little, but I really wasn’t just expecting it,” Raymon said. “That really woke me up for sure, just as fast I went back to being exhausted when we sat back down.”.

Leaving school two hours early, the CS swag team went to the City Tower in Dallas to register and prepare for the 36-hour hackathon.

“The place was really nice and fancy, like the budget on this thing was probably over $100,000, ” Raymon said. “It was kind of intimidating because most of the people there were college kids.”

Already knowing the layout of the floors, Computer Science teacher Henry Vo took the team straight to the best locations to compete, which were three office rooms, two for the teams, and one dedicated sleeping room.

“Vo had marked up on the map where the best spot was, so we put up reserved signs on the spot that we wanted,” Raymon said. “It helped us a lot because some people would code in big open areas and that would’ve been uncomfortable.”

On the first night, the opening ceremony introduced the competition challenges given by company sponsors such as State Farm, Google, Children’s Hospital and Lockheed Martin.

“For the first night, we had to submit def posts, which said what your idea was to the judges after hearing about the challenges,” Raymon said. “I was doing that in line while waiting for dinner since it was due that same night.”

Raymon’s team chose State Farm’s challenge of creating something to make people learn more about auto insurance.

“I was thinking of the idea of instead of you being the customer learning, you are the person scamming other people,” Raymon said. “That sounds a lot more fun than learning the hard core facts of getting insurance.”

Another team from CS Swag participated in Google’s challenge, which was using AI and data science machines, learning to help reduce climate change/climate crisis.

“The competition was challenging because we were against college students that had a lot more experience,” sophomore, Ben Le said. “All the APIs and concepts they worked with were more intricate and complex.”

On the second night, Raymon stayed up all night just coding in order to finish within the given time constraint.

“I remember it got to the point where I could start seeing things in the side of my eye,” Raymon said. “It was like flashes of dark spots.”

Because of the amount of work they were putting into developing their game, they ended up skipping some meals by accident.

“It was so easy to ignore our basic human needs,” Raymon said. “The lines to get food would sometimes be really long so we would end up skipping it in order to maximize the amount of time to develop our game.”

Having positive results from the first round, Raymon’s team was moved on to the second round and eventually to the lightning round, being one of only 4 teams that made it through.

“Our judges really liked ours,” Raymon said. “Vo was talking about when we were presenting it, one of the guys was out of his seat, leaning over the table the entire time, he was that excited about it.”

In the middle of the second round, Raymon was starting to lose her voice due to the lack of water in the event in general.

“Because we were on the 40th floor, there were no water fountains, we were at the mercy of Pepsico,” Raymon said. “Water was like, rare there, it was like a currency, everyone would hoard the water every time it would come so I just had to deal with it.”

While there were four teams that moved on in the end, only 3 could be the winners of the company challenges.

“When the third place was announced, we were like ok it’s not us when second place was announced, we were like ok it’s not us, so we kind of assumed we got fourth but it would also be really mean of them to not tell us in advanced,” Raymon said. “There was a small bit of my mind that was like maybe we did win, but hearing it being announced still made it surreal.”