During my junior year of high school, I had the opportunity to conduct a research project on a subject of my choosing. For my STEM I project, I investigated the Effects of Sensory Stimuli on Memory in Alzheimer’s Drosophila Models. Now that may sound like a long title, but it just means that I tested whether smell and light would increase memory in fruit flies that modeled of Alzheimer’s disease. During the project I got to learn a lot about the genetics behind gene mutations, and how fruit flies could be used as models for many human diseases for research purposes. I also got to work with Dr. Duffy at WPI, who taught me how to cross my model organism strains to create an effective Alzheimer’s model organism.

I had the opportunity to present my project at both the Worcester Regional Science Fair (WRSEF), and the Massachusetts State Science Fair (MSSEF). It was a valuable experience being able to present at MSSEF because the judges provided a lot of insight into different ways I could approach my research and a variety of ways to analyze the data.

If you are interested, and want to learn more, check out my STEM Thesis here.

STEM II is a four month Assistive Technology (AT) project that I worked on during my junior year at Mass Academy. All the juniors were split up into teams of three or four and assigned an AT project to aid someone in the community. My team had the opportunity to work with a client who was part of Easter Seals, an organization that aids people with disabilities, veterans, seniors, and their families. Our client requested help with moving snow out of the path of a wheelchair, in order to make ramps and sidewalks accessible during the winter.

This was a really fun project to work on because it taught me a lot about the engineering design process while also working directly with a client and receiving immediate feedback. My team designed a shovel that provided additional leverage for the client to easily lift or scrape snow out of the way with one arm. The shovel can also be disassembled into a much more compact form for storage. Our client loved the product and asked us to make another one to be used by other members of the Easter Seals.

We also entered our design into the Project Paradigm challenge where we were selected as finalists. This was a great opportunity for us to spread our idea around to other communities who may be in need of our device. Our final poster for the project can be found here.

Apps for Good (AFG) is a 4 month project where Mass Academy Juniors are split up into groups of 3 or 4 to create an app that helps the community. Before my group could develop an app, we had to find a problem to solve. While we were doing some research, we came across some statistics that claimed only 30-40% of 18-24 year olds vote in local and state elections. We felt that if they wanted their voices to be heard, then young adults need to be more involved in their government. We decided to develop an app that is meant to raise awareness about local and state government in Massachusetts. Our app, Bay State Politiquiz, features an interactive quiz game to teach young adults more about what goes on in their government, making them more informed when they start to cast their own votes. The app also has an explore page where users can learn more about individual representatives in their local government. The code for this project can be found here. You can also find our final project poster here.

For my CS class during my junior year of high school, I had the opportunity to work with a friend to create an individual project of our choosing. We were both interested in game development, so we started work on a game we decided to call Spidermon. We wanted to create a game that emulated the style of the retro pokemon games from the N64 system. Instead of using Pokemon characters, we decided to use Spider-Man characters, which was what led to the name of Spidermon for the game. We used the libGDX framework to design the game, and implement all the features we wanted. The final game runs on both Mac and Windows computers. The code is open to the public, so they can make their own modifications to their local copies of the game. The code repository for the project can be found here, with instructions on how to download and run the game yourself.

During the summer after my junior year, my friends and I participated in a 24 hour hackathon in Harvard. We were required to work together to solve a problem in one of three categories: Social, Health, or Environmental. My friends and I decided to compete in the Health division. For our project, we created an Android application that uses an image recognition to recognize food in pictures and provide the nutrition facts for that food. This allows the user to keep track of their calories throughout the day by simply adding pictures of every food they eat to a daily log. The competition was pretty fun, and it was great to see our final product working after all the hard work we put into it. In the end, we got to present our app to a panel of judges who judged each project, and we won 2nd place in the Health division.