Education & Access

ASCEND

✨STOP DREAMING. START ASCENDING ✨ ✨BY A STUDENT FOR A STUDENT✨

Demo video

What it does

✨STOP DREAMING. START ASCENDING ✨ (TO HELP OUR JUDGES AND VIEWERS WE HAVE CREATED A PRE-SET "DEMO PROFILE" WHICH JUST NEEDS TO BE CLICKED TO SAVE TIME INSTEAD OF CREATING A NEW PROFILE **THE DEMO ACCOUNT DOES NOT PORTRAY ALL FEATURES BUT MAJORITY, TO VIEW ALL FEATURES DIFFERENT EDITED VERSIONS OF THE PROFILE WILL NEED TO BE MADE) As a ninth grader, I realized that having the passion to learn and achieve isn't enough anymore if every door to opportunity is locked behind confusing search results, broken links, and heavy price tags. ASCEND is a free opportunity discovery platform designed to help high school students find competitions, workshops, and programs that fit their interests, grade level, preferred format, and budget. Made by a student for a student. Instead of losing hours to dead-end search results, broken links, and outdated blogs, students access a hand-verified directory tailored to their unique realities. ASCEND turns a chaotic, overwhelming landscape into a personalized launchpad. But ASCEND goes beyond simply showing students what's available. Interest-Based Matching: Discover opportunities aligned with your interests and passions. Grade Filtering: Find opportunities suited to your school grade. Format Filtering: Narrow down opportunities by format to find options that fit your preferences. Budget Filtering: Explore opportunities that better fit your financial circumstances. Transparent Eligibility: Understand why an opportunity may not be applicable to you instead of being left wondering why. Fee-Waiver Support: Explore fee-waiver options to help address financial barriers to participation. A Student-Friendly UI: Navigate a polished, organized experience designed around relevant matches rather than hundreds of random links. ASCEND helps students spend less time searching and more time pursuing opportunities that excite them.

Inspiration

Three years ago, I watched my sister and peers struggle to find extracurriculars and competitions that matched their interests. Second-guessing every step because they lacked the experience to know if they were even on the right path. They had the hunger to learn, but every door seemed to carry a heavy price tag or demand a resume they didn't have yet. At the time, I never fully understood how difficult it was to discover opportunities that could help them explore their passions, develop new skills, and work toward their dream universities. Then, I found myself in their shoes. Searching for hackathons, workshops, and competitions for high school students that matched my age, location, and financial circumstances felt almost impossible. In today’s economic climate, when families everywhere are tightening budgets and feeling the pinch of a global downturn, students shouldn't have to quietly sacrifice their passions just because the cost of entry is too high. My passion for coding and design eventually led me to GatewayHacks 2026, despite those same obstacles. Along the way, I kept thinking about my sister, my peers, and every student who might have the motivation to pursue an opportunity but never discover that it exists. That is why I decided to build ASCEND. I wanted to create the resource I wish we had: a free platform that helps students discover relevant opportunities, understand eligibility requirements, find registration links, and explore fee-waiver support when cost becomes a barrier. Most importantly, I wanted students to understand why an opportunity might not fit them, rather than simply being told they aren't eligible. We built the bridge we wish we had, so other students wouldn't have to spend countless hours finding their way across the same gaps. Because potential is everywhere. Access should be, too. So, get ready to ASCEND with us.

How we built it

We built ASCEND using Momen, leveraging its visual development environment, visual components, and built-in formulas to create an interactive student opportunity discovery platform. We used HTML and CSS within embedded components to refine the interface, layout, and styling. A small amount of JavaScript supports the Fee Waiver modal's "Open in Mail App" interaction, and an SVG favicon gives the platform its own visual identity. Behind the interface, every single listing on ASCEND, currently sitting at a hand-checked database of roughly 90 verified opportunities, has been manually reviewed by us, complete with a direct link that takes the user straight to the official web page. Our primary focus was the user experience. We wanted the platform to feel intuitive and welcoming, allowing students to filter opportunities by interest, grade, format, and budget without getting overwhelmed. We also focused on making eligibility more transparent. Rather than leaving students with a simple indication that an opportunity isn't applicable, ASCEND aims to make the reasons behind that mismatch clearer. By combining Momen's visual tools with targeted custom styling, interaction, and rigorous manual curation, we focused our efforts on building a genuinely useful solution to a problem we had experienced ourselves.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was turning scattered opportunity information into an experience students could actually use. Finding a competition is only the first step; students also need to understand its requirements and determine whether it fits their circumstances. We also wanted to avoid overwhelming users. A platform can contain hundreds of links and still fail to help if students cannot identify the opportunities worth pursuing. This pushed us to focus on filtering and relevant matches instead of quantity alone. Another challenge was accounting for the different circumstances students face. Grade requirements, preferred formats, interests, and budget can all influence whether an opportunity is realistic for someone, especially when financial pressures force students to be selective. We wanted ASCEND to account for these factors while keeping the experience simple. Finally, we wanted to address financial barriers without making promises we couldn't guarantee. Fee-waiver support became part of our effort to help students explore possible ways to make participation more accessible in an unpredictable global economy. Throughout development, we kept returning to one question: How can we make the next step easier for a student who doesn't know where to start?

What's next

ASCEND is a starting point, and we want to keep making it more useful for the students who need it. Our next steps include: Expanding the opportunity database: Add more verified competitions, workshops, and student programs beyond our current core collection. Keeping listings trustworthy: Improve how opportunities are reviewed and updated so students can rely on the information they find. Improving matching: Make it easier for students to discover opportunities suited to their interests, grade, format preferences, and budget. Strengthening eligibility explanations: Make requirements and reasons for mismatches even clearer. Enhancing fee-waiver support: Make guidance for finding and pursuing financial assistance more useful. Growing the platform: Continue refining the user experience based on what students need and how they use ASCEND. Ultimately, we want ASCEND to become more than a place to find opportunities. We want it to help students discover their interests, build confidence, and take steps toward futures they may not have thought possible the same way GatewayHacks made this hackathon possible for us to explore our passions for free. We know one platform cannot eliminate every barrier. But we believe it can make the path a little clearer.