Finally, my long-delayed recap of ICPC Youth aka the reason I was in Tokyo in the first place.
The first part of ICPC Youth was a presentation, and it… well, it went better than expected, but to be honest, I expected that it would go badly. But let’s back up to before that.
We got to the ICPC place on a bus, which made me a bit queasy, because I had to finish some stuff for the presentation. Luckily, I’m not the one presenting, although I did go up to the front to answer one question. And for everyone else’s presentation, I was possibly the most annoying student because I kept asking questions. Which is really a big contrast to last year, where I didn’t ask anything.
Anyway, lunch came and I was feeling better, so I went and had the Japanese version of Chinese food for lunch. Big, big mistake, because it came back to haunt me around dinner.
The afternoon session was a workshop, and we were split into random groups to design an app which would raise news literacy among university students. Obviously, I spent 30min arguing a point (with not very good grace, I’m ashamed to say) with the rest. Because if they’re gonna assume that the user will magically download the app, and then assume that the user will open the app, why aren’t they going to assume the user will use the app?
It doesn’t make sense to me at all, but they put that as one of the primary goals. We didn’t talk about that in the presentation, but still… I don’t get it.
When we had created mockups of the app (we were given about two hours), it was time for presentations!
Oh, but there was one extremely interesting presentation! It was an all boy’s team, and they presented at app based on the “fact” that “boys who know a lot of news will be mote mote (popular with girls)”. So once they’re finished, I raised my hand and asked the question:
“If reading the news makes boys mote mote, why isn’t the male half of Japan frantically reading the news now?”
And then everyone started laughing. I think there was some clapping too. (According to people that I talked to later on, it’s because the question was inevitable yet unanswerable) And then one of the teachers was like “by this logic, all of us (teachers/researchers) should be very mote mote. Guys, are we?”
It was a hugely interesting idea though.
My group created this mystery game x news app, where reading news and completing quests would get you points and such. It’s basically to get people in the habit of reading the news, rather than giving them a super up-to-date app. We actually got the most number of votes from the teachers, which was surprising. Apparently, they all liked the word “quest”
After the whole thing, there was a sort of party, and it was fun talking to the other students, but I was feeling really nauseous by then. Even went to the toilet, but I hadn’t eaten anything, so I couldn’t throw up.
It got so bad that Sensei was carrying my bag and let me skip the second nomikai. I felt kinda paiseh about it.
So I managed to reach my friend’s home, was fed milk and a scone, and then crashed on the mattress.
And that’s the recap of ICPC.
Just a quick note of posts to come (partly as a reminder to myself):
– Tanabata post
– Gudetama Pudding post