The 8th E-ICON

A joint South Korea-USA team takes top prize at 8th e-ICON World Contest for the development of a brilliant augmented reality app. The e-ICON contest brought teams together from all over the world to participate, challenging students to create educational mobile apps as tools to achieve United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals

Augmented Reality Based Education

Augmented Sciences, an Augmented Reality based education app, developed for Androids phones. Built with Unity Studio, Vuforia, deployed to Android Play Store.

View our newsworthy winning article

I was a part of the 8th e-ICON contest, which stands for e-learning International Contest of Outstanding New Ages, a challenge curated by the South Korean Educational system, which brought teams together from all over the world to participate including those from Australia, Korea, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Spain and the United States. I represented Team USA, including other known colleagues who also represented our nation. The contest challenged students to create educational mobile apps as tools to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations, and there was a series of judges critiquing our application based on quality, usability, and completeness. Throughout our competition, our team designed and implemented an innovative educational tool, offering a scalable and cost-effective way to teach kids from developing countries to be inspired by sciences through augmented reality. Hence, a new era of learning.

When I first read that very statement, I was genuinely terrified to the core! Why was I, a socially anxious seventeen-year-old, who failed and embarrassed by his previous hackathon experience, was picked to represent an international competition of a much larger and serious hackathon experience!!! I had a serious imposter syndrome moment seeing all my competitors for the first time, highly trained and serious about winning. Some hailed from private institutions, some were competitors to the core and anomalies like me - who just wanted to make new friends. It turns out, that I was the team lead and project manager for this competition which resulted in becoming an international winner.

I orchestrated the entire idea of the use of Augmented Reality and Education, offering innovative learning experiences while also factoring in resource constraints that developing countries are facing. During this process, I’ve commandeered our team to envision the product, collaborating with my south Korean colleagues to build and design our product promptly. There were often when I paired programs along with the main coders to debug various aspects of the codebase including the implementation of the game mechanics, which involved physical simulations of a solar system model, and chemical reactions. There also exists a severe language barrier, often, our team would constantly be communicating through Google Translate between English and Korean. Difficult as it was, I found this as a friendship bonding process. Besides contributing to the technical aspects of this project, I’ve spearheaded the marketing and pitch of our product, resulting in an award for best in pitch and presentations, in which we presented our product to ~100-200 people on stage, to educators and competitors alike.

Throughout this grueling process, I learned more about the emphasis of execution from an idea. There were projects that my competitors have built that had great ideas but failed the execution part of the competition. Usually for a great execution, one must have a great team to orchestrate that process. This involves an alignment of vision and understanding your team members, and letting them do the part of which they are madly passionate about.

View Source On Github: Augmented Science