In 2018 summer, I had the opportunity to travel to Hong Kong and intern at a non-profit through MIT MISTI and the Fung Scholars Program. I worked through the University of Hong Kong, which was affiliated with an organization called Youth Global Network. We were connected to the project by Professor Edmund Lam, who is a board member on Creative Coding for Change – or Project C – and were hosted at a Hong Kong non-profit called Breakthrough. During my time at Breakthrough, I was able to develop my web development coding skills, connect with great mentors and fellow interns, and experience the amazing culture of Hong Kong.

 

During my first week of work, the leaders of Project C explained how Breakthrough and Project C originated. Project C is a project that is focused on bridging the growing digital literacy gap in Asia. Although more students are learning to code, underprivileged communities in Hong Kong and China have no way to learn such skills, which are becoming more and more important in our modern society. Project C’s goal is to bring the MIT App Inventor platform, along with a full coding curriculum, to these underprivileged communities to give students an opportunity to learn. I came in with no knowledge of this, and I was so glad that I would be taking part in a project that had so much meaning.

 

Our team of interns at Breakthrough, along with Professor Lam, in the server room where we worked everyday.

 

In my first week of work, I had a lot of help from our mentors, Miki and Alice, and our boss, Warren. I learned that I would be working in a React.js framework, which I had no experience in. I also had little experience with web development, and Javascript, the coding language that most of our work would be in. On my first day, Miki helped me set up Git and Gitlab, which allow for multiple versions of code to be merged, and helped me download the new software that I would need. Warren gave the interns an overview of what we would be doing as a team, and Alice helped us break things down into individual tasks. It took me a while to get familiar with the coding environment at first, but everyone was very patient with me, which I was grateful for.

 

Katherine and I, the two MIT interns

 

 

Our team this summer included 2 MIT interns, 3 Stanford interns, and 3 local Hong Kong interns. I really enjoyed working and interacting with all of them; they were easy to collaborate with and willing to help me learn, and they became very good friends of mine. Most of the work that my team did this summer was on implementing a new user interface for the website. Since Project C’s focus is to bring the MIT App Inventor to students who have no experience coding, our goal was to implement a user interface that was very easy to understand and use. We created the website elements that a graphic designer had outlined for us; I redid features of the website such as the search bar and the element properties, working with HTML and CSS code to create it. Given my lack of experience, I definitely struggled with the syntax and setup of the code at first. However, as I did more and more, it became a lot easier. I started to really enjoy the work because I could instantly see the changes I was making to a website and edit them as necessary. I became much more familiar with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and learned how to inspect websites and how to display and shift elements on a webpage.

 

Another task that my team worked on was creating and running unit tests for each of the elements on the webpage. This meant that we were testing to make sure that buttons worked as they were supposed to, or elements were displayed as they were supposed to. For each change that we made to the user interface, we had to write a test and make sure that every part of the code that we had written was soundly tested to avoid any bugs. We also used a software called TestCafe to test the functionality of the website on the back-end. I liked that I was able to learn about web development on both the front-end and the back-end.

 

Our team was a really great balance of fun and productivity. To aid with the curriculum development of Project C and test the functionality and usability of our website, we held a mini hackathon one day. We all tried to create our own apps with the App Inventor – I created a picture sharing app, and others created games, pianos, and pedometers. After sharing our apps with each other, we had a whole list of bugs to go in and fix on the platform.

 

The leaders of Project C graciously took us out for a meal at Temple St. to try some traditional food

 

On weekends and after work, I was able to spend time with my fellow interns, and sometimes the others on our team. Bill, the leader of Project C, invited us to have dinner at his home, and the whole Project C team went out for meals together as well. On weekends, I got to explore Hong Kong with the other interns. We went hiking on Lamma Island and on Victoria Peak, saw both the old and new parts of Hong Kong, and enjoyed the enormous malls. We were also able to try some of Hong Kong’s wonderful food, and got to try some lesser known places that were recommended to us by the Hong Kong locals.

Our first gathering at Bill’s home, with all of the interns and some of the other employees on Project C

 

Our teammates were a great way to learn about the culture of Hong Kong. At the canteen at Breakthrough, we learned how to order drinks like lemon tea and milk tea in Cantonese with the help of the local interns. I was hoping to learn some Cantonese while in Hong Kong, as I only know Mandarin, but it proved to be much harder than I had expected. Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese were not as similar as I had hoped, which made it pretty difficult, but I was still able to learn basic things like numbers, greetings, and a few simple phrases. I definitely hadn’t expected there to be such a language barrier, but I was able to get around with the help of others. In addition to learning some of the language, I really enjoyed getting to learn about the culture of Hong Kong. Since all of the US interns lived onsite at Breakthrough, we all became pretty familiar with the Metro Transit Rail and the minibuses. We also tried our hand at cooking some dishes, like mango sago and Coca Cola chicken wings, favorites of the Hong Kong interns. I loved hearing about Hong Kong’s politics, observing the cultural differences in people, and learning about the environment around me.

 

I had an amazing time working at Youth Global Network and living in Hong Kong. Through my experience, I became a lot more confident in my coding and web development skills, learned how to communicate and form connections with mentors from around the world, and improved my ability to adapt to new situations. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to intern and live in a new culture through MISTI and the Fung Foundation this summer – it was definitely an unforgettable experience.