NCWIT Aspirations in Computing

I cannot rave highly enough about Manasa. She is my once-in-a-lifetime, going-to-be-a-super-star, I-am-so-lucky to have taught her student. She is passionate about coding (last year in my NCWIT endorsement I said that she "breathes" code) and about using code to do better in the world. 

In just under two years she's gone from writing her first lines of code to putting an app out on the Apple store called Notice Volunteer, which connects local non-profits with volunteers. Notice Volunteer just had it's launch party in mid-November. 

Notice Volunteer has over 13 non-profit clients (one of them is all Samaritan Hospitals in the state of New York!). Manu has recruited ten other students from our school to help by using the power of her own passion and persuasion to get them to buy into her vision. They are in charge of the website design, graphic design, outreach to get new clients, helping with the launch party, beta-testing, etc. 

Last year, as she was working on the Notice Volunteer app, whenever I told her "you need to learn xx" she came back the next week having spent all weekend learning it. Her coding skills surpassed my own many, many months ago.  Students in our school who want to design websites or build apps are now going to her for help. In addition, she has spent many hours a week helping our Clubs and Activities coordinator set up webpages for each club in the school.

Robyn, who uses he/him pronouns, was a freshman when I started a new coding club during the pandemic. The goal of the club was to enable students to virtually learn CS topics and compete in coding competitions. 

Robyn competed in all four of the ACSL contests that year, missing qualifying for the finals by just one point. In the Bebras Challenge, he earned the second highest score in our school in the Junior Division.

Sophomore year, Robyn enrolled in my AP CS A course, learning to code in the Java coding language. In order to place into this intermediate level course, Robyn had to self-study introductory Java over the summer. I shared handouts and videos with him, and he successfully completed the introductory material necessary for enrollment in the course. He consistently earned perfect scores on all assessments in the course, an amazing feat considering that he was just a sophomore. 

This year, as a Junior, Robyn is continuing his computer science activities in a Signature project where he built a website https://vulturesofemma.org/. He recently won the 2022 Congressional App Challenge for this project! See the article here.

I first met Chelsea when she was a quiet ninth grader sitting in a Saturday morning workshop during World Processing Day. “Processing” is a dialect of the Java programming language that allows artists and scientists to create animations, visualizations, and simulations. Chelsea, at the time, was an artist interested in exploring the intersection of code and art.

That workshop inspired her to enroll in my AP Computer Science A course as a sophomore. Few sophomores take this course, and I was impressed with her dedication to it. She came to me every week with a seemingly endless list of questions she had prepared ahead of time. To her, grades were not the focus. The learning was. So much so, that by the middle of the school year, she had decided to complete an independent study called STEAM-10. Her culminating project was an interactive visualization using cosine graphs and mouse movements. Her goal was to create art that looked and moved like water, connecting her interest in water conservation with art and code.

By the start of her senior year, Chelsea had completed more Computer Science projects, internships, and workshops than some students do in several years of college. She refined her interests and began serious work in the area of User Interface (UX) Design.

Her most impressive endeavor, to me, was when she spent her Junior year spring semester teaching freshmen in our STEAM-9 program how to create Processing visualizations. The projects that she helped students create were sophisticated, interesting, and creative.

Watching Chelsea progress from a freshman art student curious about combining coding and art to a confident senior giving back her skills to new incoming freshmen has been one of my highlights in my four years at Emma! 

Chelsea is now a freshman in college.

As a freshman during the fall of 2020, Sol was eager to participate in our virtual coding club. I was thrilled in the fall when we discovered that they had earned the highest score in the state of NY in the Bebras Computing Challenge, for the Cadet division (ages 12-14).  Sol also participated in the ACSL (American Computer Science League’s) contests, which occur four times per year.

That summer, Sol asked me for recommendations for coding websites and practice. I enrolled them in several modules at codehs.com, including Coding Explorations in Art. Then, sophomore year Sol took my AP Computer Science Principles course. Over the summer, they attended a Vex Robotics summer program learning to code and build Vex IQ robots. And now, as a junior, Sol is enrolled in AP Computer Science A.

Sol is currently the only student at our school who is a member of all three clubs that I advise (Coding, Robotics, and Engineering). 

A second-time winner of the NCWIT National Honorable Mention award, Jessica is a student who goes above and beyond. Her first project after coming to Emma was a simple clicker game, which she turned into a more complex app adding features using a concept called collision detection, which hadn’t yet been taught in class. 

After volunteering with an organization called Free Lunch, Jessica was inspired to find a way to use technology to solve problems related to food insecurity. Her idea is to use AI to analyze photos of crops to find diseases. She found a professor at a local university who agreed to mentor her in the project, then began collecting 4,000 pictures of vegetation, from both websites and images she took from her camera. After coding the model in Python—including image processing using a convolutional neural network—she built a website with a user interface (UI) for both Windows and Mac devices. She did all the pre-project research, data collection, neural network building, parameter adjustment, results analysis, and UI coding herself. 

Ms. Shah shares, “The level of detail in Jessica’s projects is professional, and the extra coding that she does above project requirements impresses me to no end. Her motivation is inspirational, her desire to do good in the world is admirable, her abilities are exceptional, and she has a joy of learning that is infectious.”

Jessica is now a freshman majoring in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Lucy’s first technological innovation, Waterloo, employed a sensor within plant soil to pump water from a fish tank when it sensed dehydration for a period of time. Another sensor in the fish tank delivered water quality data back to an app that allowed users to remotely monitor and control settings. 

In the summer of 2018, Lucy studied how computers can use convolutional neural network models to recognize objects within an image for fire detection. This past summer, Lucy had the opportunity to study logic in computer science at Stanford University. She worked on a project to train computers to distinguish natural language, collecting and analyzing thousands of words of text corpus to generate logic algorithms that allow computers to detect the extent of urgency in a message. 

Ms. Shah recalls when Lucy taught herself the new programming language used in the VEX Robotics Competition. “I highly respected Lucy for being able to work through this problem independently. She has consistently been a top student, finishing projects with ease and helping other students. She even asks for extra problems to solve as challenges!”

Lucy is now a sophomore majoring in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

As soon as I was hired to teach at Emma, in March of 2018, Sabrina was the first student to reach out to me asking about qualifications to get into AP CS A.   She told me that she had already taught herself some coding, because her older brother is majoring in CS. He helped her learn how to code websites. She showed me a portfolio website that she created to showcase her artwork.  

She took a programming course at RPI the summer before I taught her. When I met her in the fall, she said the course had been challenging because they had gone through material quickly. But she showed me some of the projects she completed during that course, and I was impressed at how much she had been able to accomplish in only 6 weeks.  

In AP Computer Science A she was easily my top student. We use several online curricula for AP CS A, including codingbat (java) and codehs. She flew through all the lessons, exercises, homework problems and was always way ahead of the other students. When I came around to check homework, I knew she had already done the work weeks before. She regularly came to me for questions about lessons that I wouldn’t be teaching until months later. I have rarely taught a student with this much motivation and desire to work independently. 

Sabrina also joined the Robotics Club that I started at Emma. As a programmer for her team she taught herself the VEX Coding Studio language. VEX Robotics just switched over to this new programming environment (based on C++) and she now knows more about the new language than I do.  

At the end of the year, she applied for, and I accepted her, as arobotics team captain for this year.  

Sabrina is currently a sophmore majoring in Computer Science at Cornell.

This is the article about her Aspirations Award.

Nicole caught my eye during her freshman year at Ranney School, when I started hearing rumors about a student who competed in robotics with her Girls Scouts Troop. I was thrilled when, during her sophomore year, she enrolled in my Introduction to Vex Robotics course. 

During that year, I encouraged her to join our school robotics club, and she became a valuable member of the club, taking on the role of team manager in addition to building and programming.

She went on to take three more courses with me: Intro to App Development, Intro to Web Design, and Honors Computer Science.

During her junior year, I was honored to be her advisor as she completed and earned her Gold Award for Girl Scouts (the equivalent to an Eagle Scout award in Boy Scouts). Her Gold Award focused on increasing opportunities for young students, especially girls, to learn computer science. During the year she organized various activities -- such as setting up computers with code.org Hour of Code activities for siblings to complete during robotics competitions -- and she organized and ran our school's Hour of Code day.

Nicole graduated in 2021 from Simmons University in Boston with a major in Computer Science. She is now working full time at Mitre outside of Boston and is also getting a masters degree in Artificial Intelligence at Boston University.

Link to article about Nicole's Honorable Mention award here.

During her freshman year of high school, Dana was a member of Ranney School's famous all-girls VEX Robotics "goldie" robot team (see mention of this team, 3815F, in this article here). Dana went on to be the team captain of 3815J, a team that won over a dozen awards from 2013-2016, including a win at this competition in 2015 (she's quoted in this article). 

During her senior year, after 4 years of trying, she finally won a coveted Design Award for her spectacular Engineering Notebook that chronicled her team's design process from soup to nuts. Here is an article about her accomplishment.

Dana took three computer science courses with me: Honors Computer Science during her sophomore year, AP Computer Science A during her junior year, and AP Computer Science Principles during her senior year.

Dana graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in 2021 with a major in Quantitative Finance. She is currently a Credit Analyst and a part-time MBA student at Villanova.

Link to article about Dana's Honorable Mention award here.

Amy was my first Aspirations award winner. She earned a degree in Computer Science from Brown in 2019, worked for a time at Facebook, and recently started a new position at Figma.

Here is a video about her HS capstone project, which was focused on computer science.

Amy was part of a team that won a hackathon in 2015 in Philadelphia. They wrote a google plug in that helped students avoid repeating phrases while writing college application essays. (Unfortunately, I have scoured online news articles and can't find a link to this achievement.)

Amy was the programmer for the robot that won a national Think Award in VEX robotics in 2015. She used an array to store successive increasing heights that the robot needed to stack and build a modular pole.

Amy took two computer science courses with me at Ranney School: Honors Computer Science during her sophomore year, AP Computer Science A during her junior year. During her senior year she completed an independent capstone project in computer science.