“SHAD is an award-winning enrichment and entrepreneurship program and network that empowers exceptional high school students – at a pivotal point in their education – to recognize their own capabilities and envision their extraordinary potential as tomorrow’s leaders and change makers.” Read more
For the month of July (2018), I had the honour of attending the SHAD program at the University of Saskatchewan! It was an amazing experience that expanded my view of different perspectives by putting me in new situations and by giving me a chance to encounter new things through lectures and workshops!
This is how Earth’s orbit would change if the mass of Jupiter increased by two magnitudes! Note: orbital model has only Earth, Sun, and Jupiter. The color gradient changes over time.
One of my favourite lectures was given by Professor Bourassa on Modelling Orbital Motion. He derived formulas to describe the motion of two-body orbital systems and then made a computer program in Matlab to model the motion.
Afterwards, by using his Matlab code and by expanding on his formulas, I was able create a Python program to model the motion of three-body orbital systems! It was really exciting to learn something new in the world of physics and orbital mechanics, and then use what I learned to make my own formulas!
Download my source code at my GitHub repository (You’ll need plotpy to see the graph).
As for workshops, I was a part of the SHAD Students on the Beamline project group working at the Canadian Light Source, the only synchrotron (particle accelerator) in Canada! You can view my experience of the program and the results of our research on my project page.
Illustration of our evacuation kit!
Participants in the SHAD program also partake in the SHAD Innovation Challenge, where they work on a project to address a problem within a certain theme. This year, the theme was resilience in natural disasters, and my project group created EvacKit, a wildfire-specific emergency kit!
You can view our technical summary and business plan in our final report.
