Every year, The Village School hosts its annual Innovation Day, a place where students from the middle and high school can showcase their projects, clubs, and creations to the community. The sheer diversity of projects this year was astonishing, ranging from battling robots to theoretical carbon capture technology.

First stop was the Vicycle club, in its inaugural year. “We created Vicycle as a CAS project, and we wanted to bring a biking community to Village. That is why we created a club where everyone can come and bike or weekend or something,” said senior Misa Dao, student body vice president and founder of the club. “Honestly, our vision is not really grand or anything, just really building better and healthier habits and lifestyles for people, trying to impact the community in ways that make people aware of our environment at the same time as their health. That’s the entire point.”

That is not all – seniors Rohan Bendapudi and Max Scholl showed the school exactly what it takes to excel in IB mathematics. “So I’m talking about my math IA, which is a math paper that we do for an IB class. And in mine I prove this problem that I found online. It’s kind of cool, exploring what I had talked about in my essay as well,” said Scholl.

“Basically, my math IA focuses on sort of using calculus to explore physics problems, just trying to combine Math and Physics basically,” said Bendapudi.

These IA’s are no light task, taking hours upon hours to complete. Students dedicate themselves to the perfection of these assessments so that they might score highly in the IB program.

“My math IA was really complicated and involved a lot of things, like theoretical mathematics and physics as well and a lot of manipulation of variables like trigonometry, and calculus and all that,” said Scholl. “So it took like 20 hours or so to do all of it, because it’s a pretty long narrative as well.” 

Bendapudi mirrored his sentiments about the project. “Mine took some time, because I was really passionate about what I did,” said Bendapudi. “So I think I’ve put around maybe like 15 to 20 hours into it, just like working things out in terms of the math, just trying to think about it as a whole. I think it was something I was really passionate about so I put a lot of effort into it.”

Like many present at Innovation Day, this was not Scholl’s first time participating. “This is my second year. I think COVID There was no Innovation Day,” said Scholl. “And I was doing Innovation Day last year for the community service club initiative along with my friends.”

“This is my second year. Last year, I set up a booth for Investment 101,” said junior George Clarke.

“This is going to be my third year going to an innovation day,” said junior Arshia Farhardinia.

One key observation about the day: it’s more enjoyable with friends, whether it be through clubs, battling robots, or presenting your papers.

“I might do something in the future if I had some friends that wanted to collaborate,” said Farhardinia.

Overall, this school encourages students to get out of their comfort zones, show off their skills, hard work, and dedication to the pursuit of knowledge, and the betterment of this school.