![Adding a tray of canned corn to the pile, junior Michael Collop assists in transporting donations for the Holiday Food Drive. The event, hosted schoolwide from Dec. 10-17, raised over 5,000 food items to deliver to the Parkway Food Pantry, helping several families in need. [The drive] is a great thing for us to do because you're giving to those who are less fortunate, and it helps provide for people who can't provide for themselves. [The] competition is always fun, too. It was fun to be in [social studies teacher Jess] Chazen’s class, because he always gets worked up over [the competition]. He made it exciting, and was always convincing us to turn in cans for the drive,” Collop said.](https://bestofsno.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/feature-photo-unsung-2.png)
![NEW CHALLENGE, NEW TEAM MEMBERS: Every season, VEX creates a new game that robotics team members are faced with and have to build a robot to compete in. This year’s game forces students to create a robot that is able to stack rings onto mobile goals in order to score points. The change in games each season is something that robotics teacher Audrea Moyers appreciates.
“One of the things that I like about VEX is that they have a new problem to solve every year,” she said. ¨Even though the equipment’s the same, they have to analyze the game, and they have to come up with solutions that are unique that year. They are using their knowledge from prior years, but they have to kind of redesign a problem.”
As returning teams were faced a new game, some new teams and members had to adapt to a uncommon playing field and game.
“Three of our four teams were competing for the first time this year, and they had very different experiences match to match, so I think they learned a lot,¨ she said. ¨It’s hard just watching a video online to know how it’s actually going to be in person, so they all learned a lot about what gameplay is like, how to work with an alliance partner [and] how to adapt during the day to changes.”](https://bestofsno.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_9283-1-1200x800.jpg)
![Davidson Institute Co-Founder Bob Davidson congratulates Arjun
Barrett (12) on receiving a Davidson Fellows award at the MIT campus on Sept. 10. “It's less about the fact that it's an award and more about the validation that [my project] is actually meaningful and has contributed in some small way to some field of technology,” Arjun said. “And that's something that I really strive to do just in general. So that's kind of why I find it super rewarding.”](https://bestofsno.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG-0564-2-900x599.jpg)
The Davidson Institute held its annual Davidson Fellows ceremony honoring the technical works of students, including Harker upper school student Arjun Barrett (12), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus on Sept. 9 and Sept. 10.
The scholarship program awarded $10,000, $25,000 and $50,000 prizes to high-achieving students who have completed a significant piece of work in categories ranging from STEM to literature to music.
Davidson Institute Co-Founder Bob Davidson established the nonprofit Davidson Institute for Talent Development in 2000 with hopes to bring recognition and opportunities to gifted students who may be overlooked to make a positive difference in the world.
“We both mutually agreed that we would support a portion of the students and young people in the U.S. that were not being served because people generally thought, ‘Oh, they’re smart, they’re going to be fine,’” Davidson said.
Deemed one of the most prestigious undergraduate scholarships by Forbes, the institute aims to “recognize, nurture and support profoundly intelligent young people and to provide opportunities for them to develop their talents to make a positive difference.” Winners of the Davidson Fellows have frequently included Harker students in the past, with alumni winners on record including Cynthia Chen (‘20), Natasha Maniar (’19), Amy Jin (’18), Rajiv Movva (’18), Rishab Gargeya (’17), Vineet Kosaraju (’16) and Yi Sun (’06).
This year, the institute named Arjun a Davidson Fellow and awarded him a $10k scholarship for his project FFlate, an open-source software package that enables websites to process and manipulate ZIP archives, PDFs and other compressed file formats faster than ever before.
He started the project the summer after his freshman year, inspired by the video game Geometry Dash. After three to four weeks, Arjun developed the initial version which he has been maintaining and updating for the past two years.
“I initially created this project to add support for a level format within Geometry Dash,” Arjun said. “To do that I needed a library that would decompress data, but the existing alternatives were very slow and not very useful. So, I just created my own. And when I realized it was useful for more than just Geometry Dash, I made it open source.”
With over 70 million downloads on GitHub, FFlate has been used by companies including NASA, Microsoft and Google. Hospitals and educational sites also use the software to access medical data and provide tutorials, increasing internet speed and accessibility for those in developing regions. Arjun reflects on his project with feelings of fulfillment seeing the effects it has had on different communities.
“It’s less about the fact that it’s an award and more about the validation that [my project] is actually meaningful and has contributed in some small way to some field of technology,” Arjun said. “And that’s something that I really strive to do just in general. So that’s kind of why I find it super rewarding.”
Additional reporting by Arjun Barrett.
This story was originally published on Harker Aquila on October 7, 2022.