I Represented FEU Tech at SIKAPTala 2026 and Somehow Left with Two Wins

As students, we often treat our projects as temporary.

Something to submit. Something to defend. Something to survive.

A system built for a grade. A presentation prepared for evaluation. A project that eventually gets buried in a folder once the semester ends.

For the longest time, I thought the same way.

Until SIKAPTala 2026 happened.

What I expected was a national competition experience.

What I did not expect was leaving with two wins and a completely different perspective on what student work can actually become.

SIKAPTala 2026, the National Computer Science and Information Technology Competition, brought together undergraduate students from 106 participating schools across the Philippines in a fully virtual national event organized by the DLSU Dasmariñas College of Information and Computer Studies Student Government.

Even through screens, the pressure felt real.

No physical venue. No stage lights. No face to face interactions with competing teams.

Just presentations, breakout rooms, unstable internet anxiety, and the quiet pressure of knowing some of the brightest student innovators in the country were in the same competition.

And somewhere in that space, I found myself representing FEU Institute of Technology in two completely different events.

That alone already felt like a milestone.

Winning both was something else entirely.

When student work becomes something bigger

One of the events I joined was the Research Presentation competition, where we presented our capstone project, **MIÓ**.

If you have ever worked on a capstone, you know it is never just a project.

It becomes part ambition, part exhaustion, part emotional endurance.

Months of research.

System revisions.

Documentation rewrites.

Unexpected bugs appearing at the worst possible time.

Late nights where progress feels invisible.

And somehow, you keep going.

MIÓ was developed as a web and mobile oralism based learning management system for the Philippine Institute for the Deaf, integrating online enrollment, speech and auditory training, and recurrent neural network based automatic speech recognition.

That is the technical description.

The real story is simpler.

It was something we genuinely cared about building.

Not because we had to.

Because it had purpose.

Presenting MIÓ at a national competition already felt meaningful because it meant our work had moved beyond classroom evaluation.

Then came the announcement.

Best Research Paper for Education.

That moment felt surreal.

Recognition within your own institution is rewarding.

But national recognition hits differently.

It tells you that the thing you spent months stressing over actually holds value beyond your own academic environment.

That maybe the sleepless nights built something worth remembering.

Then came complete chaos

If research presentations reward preparation, hackathons reward adaptability.

The Ideathon & Hackathon competition was the complete opposite experience.

Fast paced. High pressure. Unpredictable.

Out of 69 competing teams, participants were challenged to identify a practical everyday problem and transform it into a meaningful technology solution.

Our team focused on something painfully familiar to almost every Filipino.

Queues.

Not the organized version people imagine.

The actual frustrating version.

Standing in a pharmacy with no idea how much longer the wait will be.

Hovering outside a coffee shop because stepping away might mean losing your place.

Spending hours in government offices simply because uncertainty has become normal.

It is such a common inconvenience that most people accept it without question.

We decided to question it.

That idea became **Linea**.

A real time virtual queue and crowd coordination platform designed to remove the uncertainty of physical waiting.

Instead of standing in line without information, users could remotely join queues, monitor estimated waiting times, track their position in real time, and make smarter decisions before even arriving.

Businesses could better manage customer flow and reduce congestion.

It started as an idea.

Then became a strategy.

Then somehow became something much bigger.

By the end of the competition, our team was announced as Grand Champion.

Out of 69 teams.

That still feels unreal to say.

What these wins actually meant

At first glance, these look like achievements.

And they are.

But what stayed with me most was what they represented.

MIÓ represented endurance.

The kind built through months of effort, technical problem solving, and creating something meaningful from the ground up.

Linea represented adaptability.

The ability to think quickly, collaborate under pressure, and turn a common frustration into innovation.

Different experiences.

Different energy.

Different emotions.

But both delivered the same lesson.

Student work should never be underestimated.

We often think our projects exist only to satisfy requirements.

But sometimes, those same projects become proof of what we are capable of building.

Sometimes a capstone becomes nationally recognized research.

Sometimes a spontaneous idea becomes a championship winning solution.

And sometimes, the opportunities we almost treat casually become defining moments.

For every student building something right now

If you are currently buried in deadlines, debugging broken code, rewriting documentation, or questioning whether your project is even worth the effort, keep going.

Because the work that feels exhausting today might become the story you are proud to tell tomorrow.

I am deeply grateful to FEU Institute of Technology for trusting me to represent the university on a national stage.

To my teammates behind MIÓ and Linea, thank you for the trust, creativity, and resilience.

Winning twice was unforgettable.

But the bigger realization was this.

Some of the most meaningful things we build as students were never meant to stay inside the classroom.