Bay Area high schoolers are spending their summers building hardware, coding safety tools, and developing engineering projects — some for national competitions — through school programs and youth-led initiatives that foster real-world innovation.
KPIX in particular has been highlighting many of these stories. In Concord, students at Ygnacio Valley High developed a phone-controlled exoskeleton hand to assist people with limited mobility. The invention earned their team the top honor at MIT’s EurekaFest and is now patent pending. Their teacher, Joseph Alvarico, helped secure a Lemelson-MIT grant, and a local law firm offered pro bono help to file the patent.
San Francisco hosted 180 teen coders from around the world over the weekend at Hack Club’s Undercity event — a four-day overnight build-a-thon where participants created hardware projects from scratch. Sixteen-year-old Meghana Madiraju led tutorials and pushed for greater gender equity in tech. “Getting more girls into tech” is her personal mission, she said, pointing out the gender gap even at forward-thinking events like this one.
And 18-year-old Mizan Rupan-Tompkins, a licensed pilot with a background in AI, developed an autonomous tool called Stratus to help prevent mid-air collisions at non-towered airports. The system uses machine learning to detect unusual pilot communications in real time for use as a safety net, as opposed to a replacement for air traffic controllers. He hopes to launch it at 10 Bay Area airports within the month.
Meanwhile in Mountain View, as KGO reports, students with Garage 803 Racing are racing the clock to finish their solar-powered car before heading to the Solar Car Challenge at Texas Motor Speedway. They’ve been building everything by hand — sometimes with scavenged parts — and learning on the fly. Their goal is to get to the track, pass tech inspection, and compete against the best student teams in the country.
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