The theme for this year’s competition will be on healthcare. The possibilities are endless: mobile applications, web services, and even interfacing with Wii remotes (hint: Python can do it in just 5 lines). So put on your thinking cap and get those creative juices flowing!

It was actually quite trivial to guess some of the possible challenges especially looking at the description of the partners:

This year’s competition will be held in collaboration with the Health Promotion Board and the Singapore Anti-tuberculosis Association, to educate our youths and the public, through the competition, the benefits of healthy living and the harmful effects of smoking.

Like any well-trained product of the Singaporean Education System, my mind started racing when I read the competition’s site. I told my Vietnamese teammates during our first meeting that the people who will eventually win the competition are those who prepared for it beforehand.

They agreed.

Our main disagreement was the kind of preparation involved.

I shared with them that I understood how the Singaporean student’s mind generally works. There were definitely going to be teams who will attempt to spot the challenges, take a gamble and prepare a finished product before the actual competition leaving the day itself for the polishing of their work.

I was right.

On that day, I can pin-point at least 3 teams who finished their entry the minute they read the list of possible challenges to attempt. In the toilet, I heard one guy commenting to another that their friend had hit the jackpot with his project.

My teammates and I also decided to prepare for the competition. However, our preparation was confined to coding stubs that we could easily extend depending on the nature of the project. We also tested a basic system for communication between an Android application and a Django-powered portal.

Am I sore that other teams prepared beforehand. I’m not sure. I don’t exactly think they took the easy way out because the effort to prepare something before the competition isn’t trivial. What if I knew such a team won? Would I be sore? Probably. Because the efforts they took totally goes against the spirit of a 24-hour programming competition.

Yet I’m probably angrier with myself for not preparing better for the competition by writing more stubs and being more familiar with each platforms (i.e. Android and Django).

It would be a dumb-ass generalization to say that all Singaporeans spot questions and like to take the seemingly easier way out in preparation for such stuff and all foreigners do not. I do not have the temerity to assert that ONLY and ALL Singaporean students do this.

But I do know this, speaking as a recovering member of the Singaporean Education System, and that is our system does have the tendency to produce such students.

Regardless of the behavior of foreign students, it would be a total shame if Singaporeans only know how to exploit loopholes to win. Even more of a shame, if we do exploit such loopholes and do not win.

During the second round of presentations, from the questions that the judges asked, I realized that we had failed to comprehend the full scope of what it means to do ‘contact tracing’. While our system aided ‘contact tracing’, it was not a full implementation of the functionalities needed for that process.

Killed partly by missing business requirements.

An advice for teams taking part in future competitions – when choosing a challenge, it might be helpful to stay clear from those that require you to implement a system that facilitates very specific processes that the judges are already familiar with even though they might not have an application to aid their work.

So, if one of the challenges is to create a game that helps people stop smoking and another challenge is to create a system that allows health care workers to monitor the reporting of critical emergency cases, the smarter choice would be to choose the former challenge because it is less likely that you will miss out on a business requirement because of a lack of domain knowledge.

In any case, it’s a total bummer that we didn’t win anything. The two silver linings are that I found a team I really enjoy coding with and that I’ve become acquainted with the platforms Django and Android.