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Gulliver Prep senior David Krajewski is on his way to Carnegie Mellon where he will be taking classes in their School of Computer Science.
He hasn’t chosen his exact major yet. He’s interested in Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and software engineering.
“I’m going to take classes in all the fields,” he says. “Once I take those classes I will hone in on one of them.”
His love of computers shows in his community service activities. One of his main volunteer jobs is working with the Recycle Refresh Club at Gulliver.
“We’ll take computer donations and we’ll fix them up,” he says. “Receiving, fixing them, either replacing screens or updating software and from there we donate them.”
The refurbishing includes updating programs on the device.
“If it’s running on Windows 8, we’ll update to Windows 10. Or update the IOS to the latest version,” he says. “And we’ll work with members of the community to donate.”
For the past few years, club members have worked with former Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on where to send the donations. They have also donated to immigrants and to schools around Miami-Dade County.
Funding for the parts is usually supplied by the computer science or engineering departments, although the club does do occasional fundraising.
Krajewski is the vice president of the GP Computer Science Club and vice president of Zeta Omicron, the Computer Science Honor Society.
He’s the Team Captain for the Robotics Team. Because COVID made it hard for the team to get on campus to do the work, the Robotics Team spent their year developing a series of informational tutorials to help other teams across the nation.
“It was for a specific topic,” he says.
The topic? Swerve Drive.
“It’s something that was developed a while ago but not too many teams have adopted it because of the complexity,” he says. “Each wheel has two motors. The wheel (with two motors) allows you to spin while moving. It’s very beneficial in the game. Being able to grab objects while moving is very beneficial.”
There is an outreach component to being in Robotics. At Gulliver, they work with Breakthrough Miami on STEM studies.
“One of the grades would get engineering lessons, one of the grades would get coding lessons,” he says. “It’s done in partnership with Together We Innovate.”
The Gulliver students developed a curriculum for the STEM classes and teach the students from under resourced schools. Krajewski worked on the curriculum development and he also taught.
“This year I adapted a curriculum I made two years ago – in computer science,” he says.
“It involved things like programing a game and also a set of lessons involved in making art. It was fun (for them) and also for me.”
He says a lot of the students had the opportunity to make advanced projects, including animation.
“Some of the objects in the pictures would move,” he says.
When the COVD Quarantine started, he decided it was the perfect opportunity to learn new things. He took a course on machine learning.
“I’m very passionate about those things. For me it was very fun,” he says.
That course led to a research internship that looked at the hospitality industry and created a new model for predicting hotel occupancy. The research project was done in collaboration with the University of Florida and Florida International University.
He says the information going in was the same as the current prediction tools, but they changed the way the information was used.
“We created our own prediction models,” he says.
The project was capped by a research paper, presentation and publication.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
