Rising 10th grader, Homestead High. Serious ballet dancer. Interested in sports medicine / kinesiology, and also liked Engineering Design IED course (design and prototyping). Curious about wearables and body-tech.
Test three different angles into the body/movement/health space through structured sprints, then go deeper in whichever direction stuck. So by the end of the summer we have a better idea what she is really interested in.
Sprint 1 — Science: Turnout Compensation Study
- Learns hip joint anatomy and how forced turnout creates compensations elsewhere in the body
- Uses Kinovea (free motion analysis software) to measure joint angles from video of herself and 3-4 dancer peers
- Compares her measurements to a published study (PLOS ONE, 2020) that looked at turnout in dancers her age
- Checks whether dancers with more forced turnout are also the ones reporting knee/ankle pain
- Output: a visual analysis with original measurements, not a literature summary
Sprint 2 — Design: Training Aid for Young Beginners
- Observes beginner ballet classes and interviews a teacher about what 6-year-olds struggle with most
- Picks one specific form problem (e.g., posture, foot placement) and designs a physical tool to help
- Builds a prototype from household materials, tests it on her 6-year-old twin siblings
- Watches what they do with it, documents what works and what doesn't, builds an improved version
- Output: a tested prototype and a writeup of the design process
Sprint 3 — Tech: Wearables / Body-Tech
- Still being scoped
- She explores how sensors, data, and AI tools apply to the body in a sports/dance context
- Output TBD
- Decision gate: which idea and work-type felt like hers?
- Outreach to 2-3 domain experts (PT, teacher) with work to show?
- Pick a much deeper project for the rest of summer in whichever direction she chose.
- Do any coursework instead?
- Possibly a supervised clinical exposure in a sports medicine setting in a respected medical hospital (in India, where this opportunity might be easier to obtain)
Looking for feedback on this overall approach and whether the sprint designs are appropriately calibrated.