Dani is a senior (4th-year high school student) in Irvine, CA. She is our Chief Assistant Technology Officer at Interverse Educational Outreach.
Extracurricular activities are a way that many Americans get to engage in other activities. For some, they participate for the sole purpose of putting it on their resume. For others, it’s their creative outlet where you can destress and explore their passions. What is mine, you might ask? I love to animate the inanimate.
My unconventional style of animation takes me to science and engineering labs, not art studios. I spend a lot of time exploring Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in both Robotics and CubeSat. (I’m an EECS geek.) There are two activities I dedicate the most time to doing. In CubeSat, I take a stagnant piece of hardware equipment and bring it to life through the power of programming. We then implement these concepts into a satellite that we later send off into low-orbit space to perform different experiments and collect data.
Robotics is my creative outlet where I can program a robot to put a stunning performance on the field. Through code, I tell the robot to move exactly 73 degrees and move forward after picking up the three balls to score the highest amount of points possible. Some might call it the finished autonomous – I call it the finished masterpiece of an animator.
Even outside of the science environment, I continue to find myself creating and innovating. I am a long-distance swimmer on a competitive swimming team. For endurance training, we sometimes practice with the synchronized swimming division. While it is not my specialty, I still engage in the creative aspect of aquatics. By using monotonic movements of swimming, there is a myriad of choreographies that stem from its foundation of swimming.
Discussion Questions:
What extracurricular activities do you participate in? What do you do in them?
