SkillsUSA State Competition Experience

Let me start this off by saying that I am not here to explain what SkillsUSA is, more than a competition, solely because I have no idea. However, I will say that it provides the opportunity for a fun trip – funded by ECTS – to Hershey (assuming you go to the state competition).

As well as this, the two years I was given the chance to go to the state competition, it was led by Mr. Woodburn. Anyone in years past me will be led by Mrs. Nazzario (this is making me realize that some of you won’t even know Mr. Woodburn).

How I Got To Compete

As of the two years, I had the opportunity to go, I was “nominated” to go by Mr. Klins. The first year I went (2022), was for Web Development, and the second year (2023) was for Computer Programming. These two years, it did not have a district/regional level competition, it was straight to the state competition. In future years you may find that coming first place in a district will be required to get to the state level.

Trip Experience

The state competition takes place in Hershey, PA. So that’s a roughly 6-hour drive from here. There are occasional stops along the way, of course, but nothing too long. The first thing we did was took a tour of the state capital. It is a very beautiful building, by the way. After that, there aren’t too many first-day activities. We get to the hotel, mess around for a bit, then go out to dinner and that’s a wrap for the night.
The second day is a bit more eventful. It starts with going out to do something as a time killer for a little bit with lunch at noon. After lunch, some students attending may have their competition start on this day and others may have meetings about their competitions. There’s some more time to kill after this up until going out to dinner with the opening ceremony right after. If you go in not knowing anything about SkillsUSA, it will appear as if you have randomly stumbled into one of those EDM church concert things. After that, the night ends with going out for ice cream and coming back to the hotel.
The third day is typically a competition day for most students. I’ll go into more detail on the two competitions I went for below. After the competition, we just hang out for a bit in the building and go back to the hotel. The night ends with a dinner out somewhere and then Dave & Busters. I’d say that the third day is my favorite day from the number of things we get to do in the day. It’s not as much as day two, but it’s eventful.
The fourth day is the last day with the only things being packing up, going to the closing/awards ceremony, and taking the long long drive back to Erie.

Competition Experience – Web Design

The web design competition is a two-person competition that is exactly what it sounds like: design a website. This competition ONLY focuses on the front end of a website, something my partner and I did not know until it was too late. It requires zero back ends and does not need any legitimate functionality. Attached will be a git repo that contains the entire project requirements I encountered (as well as our terrible excuse for a webpage). I’d suggest learning and using something such as tailwindcss for the shorthand styling. Also, use the LiveServer extension in VSCode to start a code together session. Just ensure that the environment is set up well in advance.

Competition Experience – Computer Programming

The cmp competition is a one-person competition that, in my opinion, is very underwhelming. I was tasked with creating two programs. One of which was a “mulch calculator” that prompted the user to enter if the area for the mulch was circular (cylindrical) or rectangular in shape, which would then prompt the user to enter the depth, radius, length, and width for the area, to which it would display how much it would cost to fill the hole and write all of the data to an output file (this could be json, csv, txt, etc.). The second was a program that asked for the name of a city and an unlimited amount of temperatures. It prompts the user to add as many cities as they want with as many temperatures as they want. In the end, it just prints out the average temperature along with the highs and lows. The only thing I would do to prepare for this one is learn how to make a GUI application for it, as I came third place and most likely would have gotten first if I made a GUI app. Attached is a git repo containing the source code for my submission.