Fab Academy is an 8 month international college-level engineering program I completed as a sophmore in high school at the only high school in the world to host the program to high school students.
My local Fab Lab in my high school where I completed Fab Academy.
Part of my personal capstone project for Fab Academy.
Fab Academy is a college-level international engineering program that introduces a new engineering skill each week accompanied by weekly assignments of that new skill to complete as well as a weekly lecture hosted by the program’s creator Dr. Neil Gershenfeld of MIT. Students in the program work on their weekly individual assignment, a weekly group assignment also based on the skill introduced during that week, and ultimately use all of these skills to create a final capstone project. The capstone is then presented in front of tens of people on a video call at the end of the program. Students are evaluated on each week both locally by a local evaluator and by a global evaluator. This program is only offered to college students with the one exception of my highschool which is the only high school Fab Lab internationally that provides the program to high school students. I successfully finished the program in one cycle as a sophmore in highschool. I received a diploma for my completion which can be seen on my website under the “Certifications” page. My capstone project was my Modular Garden System, a project which can be viewed under the Projects tab.
Fab Academy was by far the most challenging thing in my entire life, as I was not only managing an 8 hour school day having taken Fab Academy during the Winter/Spring of my sophomore year, but the program itself sometimes kept me in the lab after school for up to 10 - 12 extra hours. To me it felt like a second school day, as most days of the week I would spend 8:15 AM to 3:20 PM in highschool and then 3:20 PM to 11:00 PM and later learning engineering skills and building projects, on average spending about 40 hours a week on top of school working through Fab Academy. It taught me a plethora of skills beyond just engineering, primarily how to do research and problem solve on my own without a guide or teacher to point me to the answer. I learned great time management as well as grit and determination. I worked through countless setbacks and failures during my time in the program which helped build these skills. Of course, in addition to non-engineering skills, I also gained an incredible amount of knowledge and skills for engineering. I delved deep into laser cutting, microcontrollers, 3D printing, operating CNC machinery, milling machines, vinyl cutting, bare metal programming, interfacing, networking, and so much more that I can't even begin to list on this webpage alone.
One of the most important parts of Fab Academy was thorough documentation of your work as a student not only to show a deep level of understanding of the topics but also for future students who need assistance in developing their own technology who could use the documentation as a resource on how to go about doing something specific. Separated by week/skill, my entire Fab Academy documentation is accessible online on a separate website, who's link I is below as a button. It will navigate you to the homepage of my website which hosts sample photos of my work from each week, but more in depth documentation can be found on the top bar by clicking the “Assignments” tab, which is also linked below as a separate button.