This is a fully custom multi-engine rocket I am designing and building independently, from a blank sheet rather than a kit. I began by setting hard design parameters for height, weight, and maximum G-load, then used CAD to design the fin geometry, an engine block with complex internal geometry to redirect backblast safely, and a custom GoPro mount, backing each decision with force and strength analysis rather than guesswork.

Balancing center of gravity against center of pressure took more than fifteen design iterations before I was comfortable with the margins. The simulations currently predict a maximum apogee of 225 meters, a peak velocity of 58.3 m/s, and a peak acceleration of 9.3 G. I am 3D-printing every part in high-heat ABS and ABS glass fiber, and flying a basic onboard flight computer on test launches to evaluate how well those simulated numbers hold up against real flight data.

Griffy 5.8 was our competition robot for the season, built around a pivoting multi-stage lift and claw assembly. Before we could build it, I created a collaborative CAD library, still in use by the team today, for designing and simulating the robot's more complex mechanisms, including arm-bar linkages and multi-axis claws. That library allowed us to model forces and center of gravity ahead of time, which is what actually drove our decisions on motor placement, gear ratios, and manufacturability under a competition deadline.

The finished robot won the Inspire Award and Winning Alliance Captain at the New York City Semifinals, then placed third for both awards at the New York City Finals.

Apocalypse is an 8-bit-style math education game I built in MATLAB with a team of four, styled after retro pixel-art titles right down to a hand-drawn character-select screen where players choose their avatar before the story begins. From there, players must answer numerical problems correctly to survive and advance through the storyline. An incorrect answer halts the story's progress.

I wrote and debugged most of the underlying game logic myself, including input handling, answer checking, and the level-progression system that ties correct answers to story progress. Getting the gameplay and the pixel-art rendering to run smoothly took several rounds of troubleshooting, since MATLAB is not designed for real-time interactive games, but we achieved a fully functional result end to end. The project earned full credit for design quality, code efficiency, and gameplay experience.

Working with the same team of four, I helped design a novel safety guard for tractor equipment, intended to protect operators without interfering with the machine's normal use. We carried the concept through six to seven full design iterations, using what went wrong in each round, whether a weak point under load or a shape that was awkward to manufacture, to inform the next version.

The design we landed on held up to substantial force relative to its size while staying simple to manufacture and easy for an operator to use in the field, and I built a fully functional 1:10-scale prototype of it to prove that out. Stress simulations on the frame and mounting points helped confirm where load actually concentrated under impact, which is what pointed us toward the final geometry rather than guessing. We presented the finished device in a Shark-Tank-style review in front of the class and earned full credit for design, functionality, and practicality.