I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. I raised my arm to and glanced at my watch. I’ve always been paranoid if I didn’t know the time, so I always make sure I have it on. My mom always says if she is wearing a bracelet, watch, or anything of that sort, her arm will start sweating, and I never could never understand why. Another good thing is that a lot of my friends want to know the time, and there it is, on my arm. I usually also tell them to get a watch themselves.

Today was the Hackathon, and I don’t think I am ready. It’s because I don’t know much of code. You see, the Hackathon is for 9-12 graders, and I’m only a seventh grader that hasn’t taken any coding classes yet. The only thing I have done is a bit of Python with a small class with my dad. Every Thursday, three other people come over to my house and my dad teaches us how to use the coding language Python. It usually takes around an hour. Also, and we get homework after. I have only been learning it for a few months, and I don’t think I can actually make anything with it. 

At the Hackathon, I am supposed to make a game, website, or an app using coding. We go as a group, and you can have 2-4 people per group. My group has 3 people: me, Tim, and Raymond. Tim is 3 three years older than me, and Raymond is one year older. A week before, we went to Raymond’s house to talk to his sister, Pattie, about the Hackathon because she has done participated in many of them. She said we would get 24 hours to create a project. Tim, Raymond, and I discussed some possible projects that we could work on. Some things ideas our group had ideas on was something were related to do with music, shooting games, programs that could be similar to what the FBI uses, or a website that could go along with any of the projects stated before. When I was there, I suddenly thought about how she Pattie said that it was 24 hours, and that was a full day, which meant me we might not get sleep? I asked her, and she just laughed and said that we probably won’t get any sleep.

**************

Anyways, I just got up and greeted my parents. It was around 8, and my parents dropped me off at Tim’s house because his mom was going to take us there. It took around 2 hours to get there, and we stopped on the way to get lunch. 

I had a good feeling once we entered the city because I am not used to seeing the tall buildings. I live in the suburbs of Wisconsin, and Milwaukee doesn’t have many tall buildings. There is are a lot of farms surrounding where I live. 

A tall building awaited us once we arrived. Tim’s mom dropped us off at the building and we were free. I haven’t had many chances where I just go alone without my parents somewhere, and this experience gave me some independence. I checked in, and a somewhat long line was there had formed.

I felt as though they treated security as if some terrorist was going to come any moment extremely seriously because there weren’t even buttons on the elevator. You needed a card that would just send you to what floor you wanted to go to. Once we came out of an elevator, I was slightly confused about where to go. We took a t-shirt as Then, one of the hosts welcomed us and we took a t-shirt and told us to find a place to stay for the 24 hours. There was a place that looked like an office that was in front of us. The rooms were all made of glass and almost every cubicle was taken. I was guessing each group would get one.  Tim, Raymond, and I walked around and tried to find a place, but almost everywhere was taken. We were getting lost spinning in circles of that floor. 

We found a tiny place to settle and went to the big room where everyone was supposed to meet. It was a short presentation and was pretty much just thanking their sponsors. Something caught my eye, and it was the schedule. The schedule caught my eye. First of all, we were getting ice cream as there was a midnight snack (ice cream) at midnight! Also, there was a dance at 2 a.m. and game time at 3 a.m. 

“Dude, there is game time at 3 a.m…?” I said to myself. Raymond shrugged. After the short presentation, we returned to our rooms and settled down, whatever. Then, we met a neighboring team that was in the cubicle right next to us. They were a nice group, so we pretty much just shared a cubicle because our original one was for two people. Now, we had 8 people in a 6 person cubicle. It was funny, and we talked for around an hour, and our team went most of the crash courses. There was stuff about websites, games, and AI. The website one was the most helpful, so we decided to make a website, and Tim wanted to make a game. 

For the next few hours, we hung out with that group and had dinner with them. They were funny, and it was overall a good time. That was pretty much the whole “night” and it was around midnight. At midnight, we all went to get ice cream. Also, did I mention that Tim spent that whole time while we were socializing making the game? He didn’t do anything and already spent hours on it. Maybe it was because we were younger than him, and we were just too immature or something. After ice cream, we went back and forth from the snacks and Raymond went to sleep for an hour and woke up for the dance. Tim was still working on the game. That night, everyone was pretty much living on snacks and soda. 

I’m not even sure why I wasn’t tired at all, but I wasn’t, so I watched Netflix for around an hour. It was 2, which meant it was the dance. There were around 20 people on the “Dance Floor”, and it was overall kinda sad. When people came, they came for around 5 five minutes, then left. The music wasn’t that good, and it was kind of just funny.

“Soulja Boy?!” Raymond questioned. “Actually Soulja Boy? Wow.”

I knew that it was just a really bad song and laughed. Everyone else was also skeptic skeptical about the song choices. A few minutes later, pretty much everyone left, so we left too. I then did some research on Madness Combat while Tim and Raymond went to sleep. Everyone from the other team was sleeping except two. After half an hour, we also went to see what the game time was about. We went to the room and found out the host was actually sleeping, so the kids set it up instead. It was Super Smash Bros. I have seen it, but I never have actually played it. We set up a tournament, and with just my luck, I was paired up with the person that knew the game the best. Once it was my turn, everyone was laughing at how bad I was, and I was joking around too. I said, “Hey, I least I know how to fly!” They then laughed because my character just fell off and it proved that I don’t know how to fly. “Or not…” I looked around innocently. I died lost to my opponent very quick and everyone was laughing. 

After I finished, Raymond said that we should start working on our website, so I went to work on my website. He typed up some of the code and added a picture, and I just retyped my paragraph into the website. It was pretty much just a 2nd person shooting game based off a series of animations by Krinkels. 

Once it was around 7:00, we went to breakfast, and honestly, everyone in that one cubicle felt dead. No one wanted to eat breakfast, and we just all got a bagel. We sat in the big breakfast room on our phones and looked dead. It was hilarious, and after “breakfast”, we went back and edited our website. 

“Tim, are you done with your game?” I asked. It was due in half an hour.

“Not yet.” He sighed. He literally worked on it for 8 hours! I laughed and just said ok. We turned it in at 9, and Tim was STILL working on it. 

Our little group in the cubicle waited until it was time to present, and we played BS until then. It was a card game, and the whole point of it was lying. It was funny, and we would say “peanut butter” after we successfully lied. It is now the only card game I know how to play other than Uno. We spend an hour playing that, and it was around time to present our project. 

There wasn’t really anything to say, but the judges were impressed by our graphics and sound effects. We said that we were beginners, which we were, but we weren’t so sure. I just laughed after we went out of the room. We only have 4 minutes to present, so there wasn’t much time to talk about everything. After, our little cubicle group just hung out until around 11. Then, we went to the big meeting room where the awards were handed out, and there was also a kahoot. It was about the language HTML, which I didn’t know much about. The team we hung out with most of the time got an award, and it was an honorable mention, and we congratulated them! We didn’t get anything, but it was still very fun. It was time to go, and we all said goodbye to the other team we hung out with.

On the way home, we all fell straight to sleep. I would say I was awake for a full 28 hours. Tim got the most sleep- a full 4 hours! Raymond got around 2 hours, and I got none. Surprisingly, I wasn’t tired until 1 pm, but once I laid my head down on the car, my body was in full deep sleep. Once I got home, I felt much better and refreshed from the full 2-hour sleep, so I took a shower. I knew I still needed sleep and fell asleep and found myself awake at 9 am the next day. That was about a full 20 hours of sleep, but at least I felt slightly better! 

So there I was, after 28 hours no sleep and 20 hours of sleep…

Hi Shira, great job on this narrative! I’m impressed by the amount of detail and events that you could recall. Hackathons are really tiring, but they’re a great way to gain some experience, meet new people, and of course eat lots of snacks and not get any sleep. I’m glad you had a good time, and I really liked your use of dialogue in this passage!