At the beginning of this year, during the brainstorming process of capstones, I thought a lot about what kind of project I wanted to submit — one that I would be able to enjoy creating, and that I valued personally. After having spent lots of time on the terrace, I noticed how it lacked color and warmth. To combat this, I decided I wanted to create a vibrant and intricate piece on one of the walls that would make the space more inviting for the SLA community. The project is inspired mainly by Claude Monet’s depictions of the earth, as well as the fine line works of Japanese botanical art. By combining the two, I was able to create a design that reflected my artistic style and goals. In addition to this, I collaborated with Aviva Boix to create a cohesive design of a Philadelphia skyline mosaic, blended with a naturalistic mural.

This project involved a lot of moving parts, including research for how to complete an artwork at this scale, pitching at Braskem to receive funding, purchasing materials, communicating with various building staff to discuss how to go about the project, and of course, painting the physical design. There were many setbacks in this project, mainly including communication issues and inconvenient weather. However, through this, we learned how important explicit communication is, and to define time constraints before beginning a complicated project such as this one. At this time, our project is not completed, however the evidence below shows our continued efforts of finishing the piece and being able to present a polished capstone.

For my capstone, I created a mosaic of city hall and its surrounding buildings on the terrace. My mosaic was inspired by Isaiah Zagar’s Philadelphia Magic Gardens and other mosaics of his. I wanted to emulate his use of mirrors and found objects in my piece. My mosaic was also inspired by Faith Ringgold’s vibrant quilts of Brooklyn’s skyline. I wanted to use color in the same joyful way that she did in her artwork. I worked with Darby on my project, and she did the mural of the sky and buildings that surround my mosaic. I chose to do my project on the terrace because it is one of the main spaces where students eat lunch and hang out, and it can be very dismal, especially during the winter months. I collaborated with SLA staff, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia Magic Gardens, and friends at school to source materials for this project. Throughout this project, I practiced communicating with people in a professional setting, time management, and my overall artistic skills. My hope with this project is that it will liven up the terrace and will be a source of inspiration for future students to also challenge themselves to take on a large scale art project. Due to weather conditions and various other factors, Darby and I were not able to start creating our mural/mosaic until the week of capstone presentations. The image below reflects the progress we have made so far. We intend to finish by the end of this week.

For my Capstone, I designed and built a prototype for an arm-wrestling arcade machine that recreates the fun and competitive energy of real arm wrestling—without the injury risk. After discovering a talent for arm wrestling through my background in powerlifting, I wanted to make the sport more accessible and safer, especially given how often injuries occur at higher levels. Inspired by arcade boxing machines, I began working on a mechanical and digital system that mimics the resistance and scoring of arm wrestling. I went through many stages—from sketching and brainstorming concepts in my notebook, to CAD modeling in Fusion 360, to fabricating custom parts using CNCs and manual mills in our shop. Along the way, I learned how to adjust when prototypes failed, iterate more efficiently, and balance simplicity with functionality. I also deepened my understanding of parametric modeling and mechanical advantage (especially the hard way—after buying springs that didn’t apply enough force). Despite the challenges, I’m proud of creating something original, technically sound, and fun. It was rewarding to give back to SLA’s engineering community by mentoring younger students as I worked. Most of all, this project reminded me of how ideas evolve through real-world constraints, and how problem-solving never stops—especially when you’re building something that hasn’t quite been built before.

For my capstone, I aimed to create a device that automatically adjusted the volume of a speaker or headphones based on sounds detected by the device. I did this using an Arduino, a digital potentiometer, and, of course, code. My guiding question going into this project was “How can I use technology to simplify classroom management or increase classroom safety?” So through some surveying, I found that automation was most wanted for simplicity and for safety hearing announcements, and with that, I came up with my project, AutoEQ.

Through this project, I ran into a lot of obstacles, such as scheduling and time constraints due to order or funding times, hardware issues, and, worst of all, problems in the code. The process was not the most fun, and obstacles always hurt, but I am happy I faced them. Although the outcome is not what I was hoping for the overall experience of the project and what was gained from it was worth it, learning about myself and how I best work as well as getting some project experience having obstacles that occur so much more in the real world I am leaving this capstone feeling more prepared for the things I may have to take on in the future. Here is a website with the products of my capstone —> https://sites.google.com/scienceleadership.org/gabecapstone2025?usp=sharing

For my capstone project, I created a website that teaches beginners how to code in JavaScript and make simple games using p5play, a JavaScript library for game development. This site is organized into a start page, a note page, a lesson menu, and 8 sections of tutorials, each introducing a major JS concept and some p5play concepts, alongside small interactive games, clickable multiple-choice questions, and a drag-and-drop coding activity to reinforce learning.

I began my project by inquiring about how to create a game and make it shareable to other people through a link. I planned out the layout of the website and created a visual design for the main components by using Google Slides and free assets from Kenney. I developed my game using Visual Studio Code and tested it using a live server. I learned about using Chrome Developer Tools to debug. For deployment, I first used Google Drive with DriveToWeb but encountered performance issues and an abnormal amount of third-party warnings. I then switched to Vercel and Github for a smoother and more reliable web deployment. I shared my website with people in SLA and obtained a lot of helpful feedback. This feedback is helpful for me to realize the issue I hadn’t noticed and bugs I didn’t find, which help me improve the usability of the website. Overall, I am proud of what I did and what I learned from the experience.

Link to my website: https://capstone1-phi.vercel.app/

For my Capstone, I created GEMSTONE (Girls in Engineering, Math, Science, and Technology: Opportunities, Networking, Empowerment), a digital resource hub designed to support high school girls interested in STEM. It includes monthly exploration worksheets, a curated database of over 50 extracurricular opportunities, and a series of 40 video interviews with women in STEM across a range of advanced fields. GEMSTONE is going to be integrated into 11 Philadelphia public schools and used in over 80 STEM classrooms in September.

I created GEMSTONE because as a girl who has spent four years in STEM classes, there have been many moments where I didn’t know where to start or who to turn to, and that made everything, from signing up for programs to picturing a future in STEM, feel harder than it needed to be. GEMSTONE is meant to change that: It gives girls a way in, and it gives them a head start.

Over 80 hours went into research, expert interviews, opportunity vetting, content design, and school integration. I collaborated with educators and professionals to make sure the materials were high-quality and useful. One of the most powerful parts of this project has been building a network between young girls and women already working in STEM—something that can be difficult to access in public school settings.

GEMSTONE is a resource I wish I had, and now it’s here for others. I’m proud that I adovcated for this project and believed in my idea so that it could be made an affordable, district wide resource.

Over the past year, my capstone project evolved significantly—from the original plan of building an electric guitar and learning to play it, to focusing solely on building the guitar. I chose this project to challenge myself in electrical engineering while also pushing creativity. Throughout the process, I made sure to incorporate our school’s core values: integrity in decision-making, extensive research into guitar design and construction, endless collaboration with my mentor, regular reflection to guide my progress, and a forthcoming presentation. One of my biggest challenges was attempting to design the guitar body in CAD software, since I struggle with that skill. After months of failed attempts, I pivoted to purchasing affordable parts online, only to find out they didn’t fit together. With just weeks remaining, I scrambled to find parts that worked. Despite setbacks, I devoted around 90 hours to researching, designing, and building the guitar, with tremendous help from my mentor. I’m proud that I was able to complete the project and learned valuable lessons about time management, adaptability, and my own limitations. Beyond the technical skills, the capstone experience also brought me closer to my classmates and teachers.

For my Senior Capstone project, I created a web-based, full-stack chess engine in which users can play against AI opponents with adjustable difficulty levels. Throughout eighty hours, I built a JavaScript engine with 64-bit bitboard representations, a depth-limited minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning, and handcrafted evaluation heuristics for position scoring. I combined this with a React frontend that utilizes Chessboard.js for interactive play, and a Node.js/Express backend with WebSocket support to sync game state in real-time.

The project demonstrates Science Leadership Academy’s five core values: I used Inquiry to define driving technical questions, Research to learn about algorithms and network communication, Collaboration to work with classmates and gain feedback online, Presentation to present progress through code and blog entries, and Reflection to record problems and insights in a development journal.

Key milestones involved developing the core engine, altering evaluation logic, constructing a complex user interface in terms of CRAP design principles, real-time server communication implementation, and debugging performance. Issues like search bottlenecks and asynchronous message sequencing require technical problem-solving through pruning strategies and sequence tracking.

The project instilled in me fundamental skills in algorithm design, software architecture, and user-driven development. It also made me further appreciate the application of abstract theory through practical engineering.

GitHub Link: https://github.com/wosorio25/ChessEng

LINK TO MY GOOGLE SITE: https://sites.google.com/scienceleadership.org/lyev-pitram-capstone/

This capstone was a sports analytics project related to ultimate frisbee at the professional level. I learned about a sport completely new to me, collected and manipulated data from the UFA (Ultimate Frisbee Association) website, and used code in R Programming to answer an analytic question I formulated from watching the sport. The topic I chose to explore was relating the distance of a frisbee pass to the likeness of its completion. The introduction to my research is the following:

The sport of Ultimate Frisbee centers around passing a disc across a 100 yard field, trying to score while an incomplete pass almost guarantees a turnover. When practicing, strategizing, and making split second decisions, players have the choice between “hucking” the disc deep downfield or playing it safe and “dishing” or “swinging” it to a closer teammate. Naturally, a shorter pass is more likely to be completed, while a longer pass is riskier, and could lead to a significantly more beneficial outcome. But by how much? This project seeks to measure the true risk of throwing a longer pass, and the variances in the abilities of different teams and players in professional frisbee as it relates to passing distance. This project, focusing on the 2024 UFA season, hopes to not only discover the true relationship between pass distance and success rate, but also highlight teams and players that find more success in these areas than the league average.