Country of Residence
United States
Age
15
Project title
Back Online
Project Summary: Describe your project in one sentence
In an EAST lab our servers were offline for in or around a decade, my goal for this project has been to bring them back online, make them useful for the teacher, and up to compliance with state mandated standards.
Website URL(s) or social media handles.
Project Category
My project is an existing project that I started
Project Stage
Established (We have regular weekly or monthly impact that we are reliably measuring)
Founding Story: What was the spark that led you to start your project? What was the "Aha!" moment that led you to get started and see the potential for this to succeed?
We were in class last year first few weeks of school, and the facilitator was trying to give a presentation but you could look around the room and every since computer either had a movie up or a video game. Nobody was paying attention and this bothered me, especially since this is one of my favorite classes and that has honestly made me who I am today. After that, even the facilitator came up to me and asked if there was anything I could do (I'd already been known for being tech savvy) and I said I'd give it a shot.
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve? Why does it matter to you and your community?
We're helping to give the facilitator control over the classroom and the tech inside of it rather than trying to fight students to get them on task. We're also creating centralized project, community partner and client information, and document storage, and a local LLM to help students get started making their projects in EAST since it truthfully is rather hard to do.
Your Solution: How are you solving this problem? Share your specific solution.
We started by establishing a VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network, basically splitting our network as an offshoot of the school district's WiFi, which still kept us under their control but allowed us to add extra restrictions) via pfSense to blacklist websites that students didn't need to be on in order to keep them focusses. Then we created a TrueNAS machine (Network Attached Storage, basically its like having cloud storage or google drive but it's fully owned and managed by us) to store all of our information, and a RaspberryPi (Miniature computer) that will send messages to the other servers and if they don't respond it sends me an email to my personal address so I can know to fix it. This has already started helping since students are more on task since there's nothing else for them to do. I also worked last year to update all the computers to new software and get them running more smoothly so our students can work more efficiently instead of being bogged down by spinning wheels. But this year, we're expanding on my progress last year. I picked up two more teammates to assist me, and we're working to make the servers NIST 800-53 (a set of cybersecurity guidelines established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology) compliant, as required by Arkansas state law for systems in public schools. We're creating a database of project information and community partner/client information, then creating a local AI model that feeds off of that database to help students brainstorm projects more easily, since they will have better access to materials to help them do so.
Impact: How has your project created impact / made a difference so far? Or, if at an early stage, what will impact look like?
Our project is working with everything I set up last year. Our NAS is fully functioning and is being used for some documentation. The updated computers are functioning better than ever. The VLAN is helping students to stay more on task but needs to be updated. Our Wi-Fi is currently down due to an issue somewhere between pfSense and our router, but I plan to investigate that today. We are still operational, but half of the computers are just back on school Wi-FI.
Your Innovation: What is different about your project compared to other programs or solutions already out there? How is your project new or innovative?
We're in a pretty unique situation, we're here in 2026 with computers that when I found them were running software from 2008, everything is extremely outdated and nothing recevies updates anymore which creates several challenges just trying to force things to work, GitHub a file hosting platform for tech-related projects, is Wi-Fi blocked by our district so we have to find ways to circumvent that daily to get things to work. But despite our difficulties, we still manage to make things work; we find shortcuts and longcuts, anything to get the project to where it needs to be in order to meet the goal of, at its most basic point, helping students in EAST.
How many people are on your team?
3
Your team: What role(s) do your team members play? How do you share leadership with them?
I'm the team lead managing both sub-projects we have going on right now, documenting everything we do with status updates and time logs, and managing everything we already have, making sure it's up to date and functioning as well as possible. Jesse works on our NIST 800-53 compliance. Currently, he is working to get a master Windows 11 machine we can clone to all our other computers; then we'll switch to iMacs and then servers. And finally, Kylon is working on the database and local AI model.
What’s Next: What are the next steps you plan to take to grow or strengthen your project over the next year? If your project is still in the idea stage, describe the steps you will take over the next three months to launch or begin developing it.
I want to get it fully compliant with mandated standards, that's my biggest thing right now. I personally don't want to get reprimanded for it, I don't want our facilitator to get reprimanded for it, and I don't want anything to happen to the school either which is why we're putting so much attention on that right now. But of course our AI and database project is something I came up with that I'm really excited to see students start using and filling our more and more entries in it for more projects. But, what I really want to do is organize the physical layout of our servers onto a rack or something instead of the haphazard way we have them on a desk right now with a bundle of ethernet cords tangled enough to give aynone in any form of networking a stroke. I'd also like to either get a domain set up for our lab or join our schools to have better control over everything.
How do you encourage other people to join your project or learn about the problem you’re working on? If you have a new idea, tell us how you will do this in the future.
When I'm working on the servers, everyone is always amazed at what I'm doing and wants to know how I learned to do it. My answer is always trial and error, ChatGPT, and YouTube. But then, I start teaching them some basic stuff to show them it's really not all that hard, and I offer that if they work with me, I'll teach them even more. Now, for some people, they don't care enough, but for others, they want to know and put in the effort, and in some areas now know even more than me. That's another effect my project has: it teaches people who are interested in tech stuff, and if they're invested enough, we're doing similar things to the industry standard, just with decidedly worse hardware.
