1 of 60

MAGIC

Mentee Presentation

Castilleja

May 21, 2026 @ 4 - 5:30

1

2 of 60

Agenda

  • Katherine Cheng
    • Baking App: Katherine’s Korner
  • Asmara Haile
    • Nature Website: Nature Soundscapes
  • Saori Sanchez Habib
    • Godot Platformer Project
  • Namrata Ganesh
    • Genetics Website
  • Sahana Shyamasundar
    • Choir App
    • Clicker Game

​

2

3 of 60

Katherine Cheng

Grade 6, Castilleja School, Palo Alto, CA

Link to Mentor Intro

3

4 of 60

My Mentor

  • Lily Zhang
    • From Indiana
    • Currently lives in California
    • Program Manager at Skydio
    • Bachelors @ Purdue University
      • Majored in Finance, Management, Marketing
    • Masters @ University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
      • Business Administration
    • Enjoys baking, cooking, tennis
    • Playing with her cat

4

5 of 60

My Project

  • Baking Website
    • Katherine’s Korner
    • Created a Website
    • Love baking; wanted to incorporate something related
    • Recipes I recommended
    • Tested and approved
    • Helpful hints for baking

​

​

​

5

6 of 60

Technical & Core Skills

​

Technical:

  • HTML: Content and structure in setup
  • CSS: Colors, fonts and other design details
  • JavaScript: Interactive and responsive details

​

Core:

  • Communication Skills
  • Presentation Skills
  • Problem Solving
  • Logical Thinking

6

7 of 60

My MAGICal Experience

    • Highlights:
      • Collaborating with my mentor
      • Learning different coding languages
    • Lessons Learned:
      • Not everything will go the way you plan
      • Building a website
    • Challenges:
      • Fixing tiny bugs in the code
      • Organizing code

​

7

8 of 60

My Demo

8

9 of 60

Thank you!

9

10 of 60

Questions?

10

11 of 60

11

12 of 60

Asmara Haile

7th Grade, Castilleja School, Palo Alto, CA

Link to Mentor Intro

​

12

13 of 60

My Mentor

  • Melissa Meyers
    • She has a masters in Biomedical Engineering
    • She taught BME 133 (Programming for Biomedical Engineers) last year at SJSU and worked for 11 years in the medical device industry
    • Her current job is being a classroom volunteer and mom
    • From Texas and Florida
    • She likes to hike, swim, and listen to music

​

​

13

14 of 60

My Project

Nature Soundscapes

What it is: An interactive website where users can explore nature locations around the world, click on photos or map pins to open popups, and listen to ambient sounds from each environment

​

Why I selected it: I wanted to learn more about coding and making websites and Melissa and I like music/sound and nature so I wanted to incorporate them

​

How far I got:I have a live and deployed website on GitHub Pages, with an interactive photo gallery, audio popups with sound, and a map with location pins

​

Future work: Normalize the audio so all sounds play at a similar volume

​

​

​

14

15 of 60

Topics and technologies learned

  • HTML — structuring web pages, embedding audio and images
  • CSS — styling layouts, responsive design, animations, z-index stacking
  • JavaScript — DOM manipulation, event handling, audio control, class toggling
  • Responsive Design — viewport units (vh, vw), media queries for mobile
  • GitHub — version control, uploading and managing project files
  • GitHub Pages — deploying a live public website
  • Debugging — fixing CSS conflicts, 403 server errors, browser behavior differences
  • Web Audio — playing, pausing, and fading sound in the browser
  • Favicons — adding a custom icon to the browser tab
  • Modal Windows — building popups with overlays and close buttons
  • W3Schools/CodeAcademy — incorporating learned elements into my code

15

16 of 60

My MAGICal Experience

​

      • Some highlight have been…
        • Publishing my website and it working!
        • Debugging popups
      • I learned about…
        • CSS layouts
        • Publishing a github site
        • Favicons
    • Challenges
      • My mentor and I have computers with different screen sizes and browsers and things appear differently but ended up making my project more accessible to different devices

​

16

17 of 60

17

CSS HTML JS

18 of 60

18

19 of 60

19

20 of 60

20

21 of 60

My Demo

21

22 of 60

Thank you!

22

23 of 60

Questions?

23

24 of 60

24

25 of 60

Saori Sanchez Habib

7th Grade, Castilleja School, Palo Alto, CA

Link to Mentor Intro

25

26 of 60

My Mentor

  • Jo Yu
    • From China and currently live in California
    • Works at Google as a software developer
    • Graduated from University of Texas Austin
    • Loves snowboarding and surfing.
  • Mentor photo, preferably with mentee, goes here

26

27 of 60

My Project (Python)

  • My project is a game I created on Godot
    • A platformer on Godot
    • I wanted to learn how to design and create a 2d game in which you can move, jump in, and do much more!
  • I learned:
    • Programming Basics in Python
      • Data: Strings, Integers, Floats, Variables
      • Control Flow: if/else/elif statements to check what something is and have an output.
      • Loops: Repeating a piece of code for a certain amount of time or until a condition is met.
      • Lists: Keeping track of data in a list/2d list.

27

28 of 60

My Project (Godot)

  • I also learned:
    • Game Development (Godot Engine)
      • 2D Animation: Adjusting the sprite texture, movement, and frames per second.
      • Character Movements: Controlling how the player moves: such as jumping or moving left/right and gravity.
      • Collision Systems: Giving a player, obstacle, walls, and blocks a collision shape.
      • Visuals: Make sure the players movements and animations are working well together.

​

28

29 of 60

My MAGICal Experience

  • A few bullet points about my experience
    • Highlights
      • Learning Python and seeing the gaming characters come to life
      • Adding new creations to make each level more challenging from the next.
      • Some of the new creations I added since the midpoint check was..
        • Moving platforms, slime-shaped jump boosters, keys to unlock the next level, and green tubes like in Mario. (goes to another part of the level)
    • Challenges
      • Understanding how for loops and while loops work, and the syntax of GD script
      • Handling errors because we didn’t understand the gravity when adding new things.

29

30 of 60

My Demo - Before Midpoint: The first level of my Godot Game

30

31 of 60

My Demo - After Midpoint: The rest of of my Godot game

31

32 of 60

My Demo - After Midpoint: The Key in Action

32

33 of 60

Thank you!

33

34 of 60

Questions?

34

35 of 60

35

36 of 60

Namrata Ganesh

8th Grade, Castilleja School, Palo Alto, CA

Link to Mentor Intro

36

37 of 60

My Mentor

  • Snigdha Agarwal
    • Works as a Software Engineer at Bighat Biosciences
    • Writes code for her company’s internal website that helps scientists visualize and manipulate their data
    • Born in Delhi, India, but grew up in the Middle East
  • Fun Facts:
    • Enjoys reading, watching movies, singing and dancing
    • Has a dog from a rescue center

37

38 of 60

My Project

  • Describe your project
    • Genetics Calculator + World Blood Types + Information on Genetics
    • Website
    • Using Python
    • Made multiple genetic calculators and pie charts
    • Add a mini project on genetics with plants on the site after MAGIC is over

​

​

38

39 of 60

My MAGICal Experience

  • Some of the characteristics of my MAGICal Experience -
    • 3 highlights:
      • It was lots of fun sharing to my mentor what I completed over homework!
      • I loved brainstorming new ideas to add to our project!
      • I enjoyed learning about my mentor and the work that she does!
    • 2 lessons learnt:
      • I learnt a lot about coding!
      • I learned more about genetics through MAGIC
    • Any challenges:
      • Definitely learning more about coding! I’m so thankful that my mentor was such an amazing teacher!

​

39

40 of 60

My Demo

40

41 of 60

Thank you!

41

42 of 60

Questions?

42

43 of 60

Sahana Shyamasundar

8th Grade, Castilleja School, Palo Alto, CA

Link to Mentor Intro

43

44 of 60

My Mentors

  • Lakshmi Murugan (mentor until 2/21)
    • Works for the Google Play Analytics Team
    • Member of the Forbes Technology Council and Women in Data
    • We both have dogs

44

  • Ira Pramanick (mentor starting 2/26)
    • Software engineer at Verily Inc
    • Moved from India to the U.S. to pursue a PhD
    • Learns chess on Duolingo
    • Favorite subject is math
    • Really enjoys programming

45 of 60

My Projects

  • Two Projects
    • Choir App
      • Using FlutterFlow, a visual app builder using drag-and-drop
      • Not much flexibility
    • Learning Python
      • With W3 Schools
      • Used it to make a game

45

46 of 60

My Projects

  • Choir App
    • An app to organize choir songs
    • Using FlutterFlow
    • Learning how to have a good user experience
    • Learning how to design apps
    • Having an app with user interaction

46

47 of 60

My Projects

  • Clicker Game
    • Learning Python
      • Started learning Python on W3 schools
      • Variables, Loops, Collections (lists, dictionaries, tuples, sets), Conditions, Functions
    • Creating a user-interactive game
      • Used what I learned to make a clicker game with Pygame
      • Made buttons and used variables
      • Event processing

​

47

48 of 60

Choir App - Original Mock

48

49 of 60

Choir App - Database

49

50 of 60

Choir App - Screenshots

50

51 of 60

W3 Schools - Learning Python

51

52 of 60

Clicker Game - Code Screenshots

52

53 of 60

Clicker Game - Code Screenshots

53

54 of 60

Clicker Game - Code Screenshots

54

55 of 60

My MAGICal Experience

  • Highlights
    • Figuring out how to get user input
    • Playing the finished Clicker Game
    • Working on Python with Ira

​

  • Challenges
    • The move() in-built function not working in Pygame
    • Being able to make choirs customizable�
  • Lessons learned
    • The best way to learn a coding language is by putting it into practice
    • Sometimes you have to work around problems
    • It’s important to test after every change

​

​

​

55

56 of 60

My Demo - Choir App

56

57 of 60

My Demo - Clicker Game

57

58 of 60

Thank you!

58

59 of 60

Questions?

59

60 of 60

60