Telling experience How to be productive during pandemic

Online Learning doesn’t hinder you from Great Achievements

  Greetings, before we continue let me introduce myself. My name is Rakha Sapta Fabian, often called “Rakha”, I’m 13 years old living in Indonesia, and study at IDN Boarding School Jonggol.

Ever since the Corona Pandemic started to spread throughout the globe, starting in March of 2020 I had been beginning Online Learning. During the first few months, I was still in 7^th Grade. The first time I attended an online class it felt normal, nothing much really. The difference I noticed is that teachers have limited monitoring of your behavior during classes, the only downsides of online studying are that sometimes my connection would just not work, or oftentimes the power would go out for a whole day. Fortunately, I was still able to keep up with my studies even with the amount of work given each day. 

At home, I used most of my time playing or developing games. It’s often that I use my time productively, such as working on my projects or finishing the work given to me from school.

In April of 2020, my school held several competitions including a poster competition about the current pandemic and a speech with various themes. Whilst I was not too excited about participating, I had decided to do it since I had plenty of free time.

Two months after the previous competitions, another one was held by my school. It was a Scratch competition with a theme related to the Corona Pandemic. I decided to join the competition. The concept of the game was about a person named “Eduboy” and his penguin friend “Pingi” going on a silly quest to learn about the Corona Pandemic. I deliberately designed the game in a friendly matter so younger players of my game would be interested in playing, which meant they were also taught knowledge about the Corona Virus. At the beginning of July, it was announced that I had become the sole winner of the competition.

 

One night, I was informed about the existence of two international competitions based on Scratch, one was held by KiroTech in Malaysia, and the other by IKCC in Romania. Hearing that I wanted to give it a try and went to register for both competitions. Since both competitions were done on Scratch it shouldn’t be hard right? (I was wrong).

 

The theme of the competition organized by KiroTech was "Embracing 17 Sustainable Development Goals" and the one held by IKCC was "Saving Our Planet". For the IKCC game, I came up with the name “Save our Planet” (Very creative). In that game, I wanted to give knowledge of Global Warming. I had some nice concepts on what the game should be like. I had taken inspiration from my previous project and came up with 2 similar characters, Natureboy and Rockboy. The story of the game would be about Natureboy’s quest alongside his friend Rockboy on visiting the house of another friend who got sick, which is Earthy, a replica of Earth. The game taught us to be more aware of Global Warming and the effect, and on how we could help to prevent it.  

And for the contest held by KiroTech. It would have a similar design to the previous 2 projects that I had made, but the difference was I focused more on gameplay rather than cutscenes and such. The main reason was that I wanted to create 17 mini games inside 1 Scratch file, which meant that all the 17 SDGs would have their own playable minigame. At the time I questioned if I could even fit 17 games inside one file, due to Scratch not being able to handle such large projects like this one, but either way I still tried. That was a big project, I had made 17 different minigames. Each game educated you about a better future for all in 2030.

 

Both projects (KiroTech and IKCC) took a while to make, and the development progress was intense. Every day I would work on a project which could range from 2 hours to 4 hours, which meant I had limited spare time in a day. At weekends I usually have more free time, which means more time to work on the project. And if I would be honest, I was pretty stressed out, but I eventually got out of it and moved on.

 

12^th November 2020. The day passed normally, nothing much happened. Doing my daily work from school, developing my indie project, etc. Until around 18:00 PM. A teacher of mine congratulated me for winning 1^st place at the KiroTech competition. At the time the phone noise was a bit gibberish so I didn’t really know what he said until my parents got home and told me that I had won. Out of all 100 countries, 4158 participants, I had gotten first place in the 13-17 year category. I was pretty tired so I just said “Okay” and went back to doing whatever I was doing at the time.

 

15^th November 2020. At around 5 AM in the morning, I was about to do my daily prayers until my parents came to me and said that I had once again, won first place out of 33 countries, 546 contestants in the 13-14 year category, but this time in the IKCC Competition. Again, I just woke up and was a little dizzy so I said “Alright” and did my prayers.

It was until I finally was fully awake when I realized I had won first place in 2 International competitions and I was proud. And anyway, After several months passed, I was starting to miss my school, my friends, my teachers, and most importantly my bed. hopefully, this pandemic would disappear soon

 

And from those experiences, I have learned one thing. No effort betrays the results, we must always be humble, and never be easily satisfied by the achievements you had gained. After telling you my story, I hope that every one of you still studying at home or just generally listening to me that you shouldn’t give up, trust in yourself and always ask your parents for support if you feel hopeless because of their support you can conquer your dreams.

Written by Raka