Confused and frustrated

I've spent the majority of my afternoon and several hours last night working on my project-based assessment for hatchways.io. I've made a lot of progress with it in a short period of time, but I still have a long way to go. There have been several points where I was ready to give up, but I pushed through and made it to the other side. At this point in time, I'm completely stuck and can't find the answer to the issue I'm having. I don't know if I've coded myself into a hole I can't dig out of or if I'm just thinking about it wrong, but I can't seem to get past this point. I'm trying to be fairly vague as to what I'm struggling with because I know hatchways is protective over their assessment and they don't want everyone to know what it is before they start getting timed in the project, so forgive me for not going into details. I've explored a lot of different options and ways of thinking about the problem, but nothing seems to be quite right. I've tried walking away and coming back to it, but that doesn't seem to help either. I've gotten a lot further than I thought I would, but this seems to be a dead end.

Despite the frustration, this has opened my eyes to a completely different way of approaching the learning process, and one I've contemplated often: project-based learning. People talk about tutorial purgatory, where the beginner can get stuck in an endless loop of watching tutorials instead of just learning by trial and error. I don't completely agree with this school of thought. If a beginner focuses solely on building projects and learning through the process of creation, there will always be gaps in their knowledge. At the same time, if a beginner only watches tutorials, they'll struggle with taking that knowledge and applying it. I think there is a happy medium somewhere in there, where enough tutorials are consumed and that knowledge is applied to building projects. Right now, I wish I would have spent more time focusing on building and less time consuming tutorials, but I don't regret anything about the path I've taken so far. I have a great base of knowledge, now, and I feel like I'm completely ready to dive into some difficult projects and work through the struggle, as I am with this current project.

This project-based assessment is timed, and they say it's preferable to complete the project within 24 hours. I always considered this to be a goal, but never thought it would be fully attainable. I'm not 15 minutes past 24 hours, so I obviously missed that deadline. There are 5 parts to this project, and I'm on the 5th part, but like I said it has me at a complete deadlock. I also haven't styled the project at all, yet, and I suspect that's going to take much longer than I anticipate. Since I'm so near the finish line, giving up definitely doesn't seem like an option at this point, so I need to keep exploring for different solutions to my issue. There has to be a way to make this work, and I'm going to figure it out.

Until tomorrow!