Mentor: Charlie Liu, Student at Yale University

Ever heard of a "falling sand" game? (if not, check this out: https://sandspiel.club) Not only is this a really fun project to work on, but it also incorporates several topics outside of CS, such as physics and basic biology concepts. The project also doesn't have to mimic the traditional "falling sand" style - it could incorporate some twist or new element, such as adding a "person" character or drawing some inspiration from the Sugar, Sugar game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWCkmqUaZpM). Ready to start building your own sandbox world?

Mentor: Omar Shehata, Graphics engineer at Cesium

Create a web app to visualize LiDAR data from self driving cars.

LiDAR is a way of obtaining an accurate 3D representation of a scene, often used in self driving cars to detect their surroundings. Lyft recently released a large dataset of sensor readings from their self driving car work: https://level5.lyft.com/dataset/

Most analysis done on data like this is done without visualizing all the data together, because it's in different formats/too large to efficiently visualize in real time. This project would involve taking this data, converting it to a standard format that Cesium's pipeline can ingest (likely using Python since it has many of the helper libraries you'll need), and then building an application to visualize it in 3D using Cesium's JavaScript library.

This would not only help people get more insight out of this particular dataset, but would provide a framework for anyone doing self driving car analysis to see their result and share their research. For inspiration you can see how people are analyzing this data in this Kaggle competition:

https://www.kaggle.com/c/3d-object-detection-for-autonomous-vehicles/discussion/109415

Mentor: Tim Van Cleave, Engineer at SPS Commerce

As a photographer one of the most important things you can do is share your work to build a reputation for yourself, but often it's not as easy to get well-organized feedback about your work from others. If you want to improve your art, either as a professional or just a casual enthusiast, it's extremely important to get your work in front of others so you can keep improving.

This project aims to solve this problem by creating a site where photographers can upload their portfolio and then have fellow photographers leave comments about things that can be improved, things they like, etc.

Key user requirements are:
* Users can upload their own photos and display them in a clean, easy to view way.
* This includes the users display name, home city, etc.
* (optional) use the photo's EXIF data to display information about the camera, lens, and other settings interesting to a photographer. Location information would be super cool as well!
* Users can indicate that they want only some of their photos to be reviewed by others
* Users can leave comments on individual photos where a review is requested

This project will teach a variety of useful technical skills, including:
* Developing a clean, fast API using Django and Django Rest Framework
* Uploading photos to a cloud hosting service like S3
* Modern React web app development, including using component libraries and other tools to simplify development
* User-centered design throughout the project
* AGILE best practices (don't worry, just a light version!)
* Having fun while making something awesome!