Senior Ventures Spotlight: Ansel Enverga, An Nguyen & Javin Pandya

What if we told you that the technology in your phone is more powerful than the computer that sent astronauts to the moon? In a technology-driven world where everything gets more advanced over time, it is more crucial than ever for more communities to be exposed to new technologies.

We're An Nguyen, Ansel Enverga, and Javin Pandya, seniors at Darlington. Our Senior Ventures Project aims to spread awareness of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in our community and prepare the next generation with the skills necessary to solve complex problems and support our world. We wish to equip the younger generation with STEM, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills that are ultimately needed to tackle the future.

With our experience working with competition robots as high schoolers, we understand the importance of outreach and exposure to STEM. Through this project, we aim to bring that exposure to our community through collaboration with the Robotics Team.

Some of our recent activities include:

• MakerChallenge Camp at Darlington: We led the annual MakerChallenge Camp as counselors, introducing over 30 children from grades 3–8 to basic programming concepts. This introduced young children to the basics of coding and robotics, which may encourage them to do it in the future.
• Tour of Georgia Tech’s RoboJackets and Advanced Manufacturing Facility: In October, we organized a tour for seniors at Darlington to visit Georgia Tech’s RoboJackets, a competitive robotics team, and their Advanced Manufacturing Facility. This experience exposed us to high-level technology used in manufacturing, which allowed us to see how our skills in STEM could be applied in the future.
• Robot Demonstration at the Tellus Science Museum: In November, we partnered with the Tellus Science Museum to showcase our competition robots and promote the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics program. FIRST is the competition company that we participate in which stands for: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. We demonstrated our robots to hundreds of museum visitors, including young children and their parents. This event allowed us to reach a wider audience and spark interest in STEM among the general public.
• AP Computer Science Workshop at Darlington: We organized a hands-on workshop for the AP Computer Science A students at Darlington, giving them the opportunity to practice their coding skills on real-life robots.

We met and collaborated with more than eight robotics teams from Kazakhstan, Russia, Vietnam, and Brazil. Through these virtual meetings, we helped teams with the design process, programming advice, and strategies for outreach. We’ve also been posting on social media to promote FIRST, reaching over 2,255 accounts on Instagram and 6,675 views on YouTube in just the last 90 days.

Looking forward, we plan to tour medical facilities, connect with more teams, and continue the monthly Appy Hour tech showcase at school, which is an event we host during the club period to give recognition to skilled students to showcase their projects in technology for the entire school community. We also will prepare our team for our state competition and aim for the Inspire Award, which is awarded to the team that exposed their community to FIRST, taught their community about the importance of STEM, and showed creative problem-solving solutions on and off the field. By the end of our project, we believe our community will have some of the skills and knowledge necessary to solve complex problems and lead our world as a new generation of problem solvers.

Senior Ventures is a year-long academic program built on a framework of leadership, innovation and community engagement. Through a proven self-guided exploratory process, seniors whose proposals are selected for this program work independently to develop a project that’s interdisciplinary in scope and is connective, performance-based, investigative, or entrepreneurial. Click here to learn more.