Mario Yang '21

How did your interest in technology begin? "I saw on the news that researchers were using robots to go into the remains of a power plant. They used robots to search for, and eventually find, the uranium that had escaped the plant's reactors. They said that it was important for the robots to be able to do the same things that a human arm can do. I was trying to help in that process, so I made a mechanical arm. The arm simultaneously imitates human movements. If I move my arm, the robotic arm moves with my arm."

Did you teach yourself how to make the robotic arm? "I received some professional help with certain tasks, like adjusting gyroscopes and some programming, but I designed the arm and did most of the programming myself. I haven't received any formal courses until this year at Brooks. Until now, I've been self-taught: I read a lot of books, and videos on YouTube have also been really helpful, especially when I was building my drone. There are a lot of great YouTubers who share their experience."

Tell us more about the drone you built. "The drone I built was originally intended to be a race drone. I designed it to move quickly: Its velocity can reach 90 m.p.h. Last year, I ran cross-country in the fall. [Former cross-country coach Ryan] Dobbins wanted me to shoot an aerial video of our cross-country course that we could send to other schools to help them learn the course. I also shot a video of Ms. Perkins's house — it was a welcome video for her holiday guests."

What other projects are you working on? "I've also made a scanner that turns a piece of artwork into music. It's a physical scanner that has a data sensor on it that scans the entire picture. It turns the picture into pixels and analyzes the pixels' RGB values to turn the pixels into sounds. I've gradually started to learn more about deep learning and artificial intelligence. I've tried to analyze the tone of each part of the picture and interpret the feeling, the color that represents, and correlate that to chords. It's really complicated to turn something objective — values of color — into emotion, into music."