It’s safe to say that high school freshmen couldn’t really do much during the 2020-2021 school year. I certainly did what I could–by joining 4 clubs and participating in Summer@Brown–but ultimately what I did do was nowhere near what I’m already accomplishing in 10th grade.
I can say with certainty, though, that the virtual art gallery I helped put together is by far my most esteemed achievement.
Along with my two best friends and a new classmate, I joined Innovation Club at the start of 9th grade. As it emphasized in the club description, the primary goal of the club was to advance the state of BRP’s technology and make the community more innovative as a whole.
Given the then-current state of education, we found it relevant to explore alternatives to Zoom in which to uphold an academic environment, which we found in abundance in online virtual world programs. We explored several of these, including 3DWebWorldz, gather.town, and Kitely, but ultimately we chose a different web-based program, Mozilla Hubs. Over the first few weeks of becoming accustomed with virtual worlds, our time was spent mainly fiddling around with the myriad possibilities within a simulated environment.
But crunch time came when we were notified of the lower school’s struggling efforts to hold their annual arts showcase in person in light of the ongoing COVID pandemic. Through numerous experiences, it was found that gingerly holding up a piece of paper to a computer camera is less than sufficient for showcasing artwork to others.
Naturally, we at Innovation Club believed Mozilla Hubs was the perfect solution. It was user friendly and easy to navigate, came with multiple room templates to choose from, and featured the unique ability to support images “tacked” to flat surfaces.
So we spent several Discord sessions planning, prototyping, and implementing potential layouts for such an art gallery, and when the time came to start building the finished product, we were each assigned a portion of the total collection of art pieces that needed to be organized, which totaled 129 across grades K-5.
Once the layout plans were finalized, it was simply a matter of inputting our respective artworks into each of our rooms, putting the finishing touches on our main reception room (which contained far too many high-poly digital furniture pieces for my Chromebook to handle) and broadcasting the link for all the school community to enjoy.
While I didn’t attend the gallery’s debut myself, we were overwhelmingly thanked for our efforts by the lower school arts department and even rewarded with pizza!
But it wasn’t the gratitude we received that make that project the highlight of my freshman year. Rather, it was that first taste of being an engineer–whose purpose it is to solve society’s problems in innovative and sustainable ways–that inspired me to remain a member of Innovation Club and to continue improving BRP’s educational infrastructure.