ICS News Archive

ICSSC Hosts Annual WebJam Competition to Teach Web Development

The Information and Computer Sciences Student Council (ICSSC) kicked off the fall quarter with WebJam 2021, a weeklong competition that was open to all UCI students who wanted to learn web development.

Students had the option to participate in the competition individually or in teams of up to four students. Between Oct. 11-15, students learned the skills they needed to create fully functional web applications. 

“We have so many events,” ICSSC Event Chair Nicole Pham said during the kickoff ceremony. “We have our opening ceremony, which is happening right now, but we also have six different workshops. A bunch of organizations are helping us out by providing introductory workshops.”

Various interactive workshops were hosted on Zoom by ICSSC and the following UCI clubs: Design at UCI, Women in Information and Computer Science (WICS) and Management Information Student Society. The student organizations taught participants the fundamentals of web development, from UI/UX design (Design at UCI) to Python Flask (WICS).

“We want to thank all of our partnering clubs because we really couldn’t have gotten all of these workshops without them,” Pham said. 

Along with the workshops, ICSSC created a WebJam Discord server where participants could easily connect with each other via chat and voice calls, access WebJam resources and reach out to event organizers for help throughout the week. 

The final day of the competition took place on Friday, Oct. 15, and was the only in-person event of the week. In Donald Bren Hall 6011, four teams presented their projects to a panel of judges: Computer Science Associate Professor of Teaching Jennifer Wong Ma, ICS Lecturer Shannon Alfaro, and Student Center and Events Services Marketing Manager Michael Brian Petyo. Judges evaluated projects based on four criteria: user design/experience, innovation, technical difficulty and presentation.

The winning teams received Amazon gift card prizes. First place won $100 per team member, second place won $50 per team member and third place won $25 per team member.

Winning Teams

First Place: Higher or Lower
Higher or Lower was made by sophomore cognitive science major Minh Nguyen and freshmen science and engineering major Kirby Ammari, computer science major Jake Gerber and computer science major Ivan Rigney. The web application presents two YouTube videos side by side, and users have to click on the one they think has more views. The screen turns green when the video with more views is chosen and red when the video with fewer views is chosen. 

Second Place: PJ Ramen Shop
Junior computer science major Jessica Susilo and sophomore informatics major Priscilla Widjaja created PJ Ramen Shop for the competition. PJ Ramen Shop simulates the experience of building your own bowl of ramen, allowing users to choose their own soup base, noodles and toppings.

Third Place: VisitChina
Freshmen physics major Jia He, computer science and engineering major Benson Jing and undeclared major ZhengHong Asher Wu built VisitChina. As users browse through the web application, they can learn about the following locations in China: Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai and Tibet.

— Karen Phan