Niwot High senior Sienna Arellano’s first introduction to computer science was a class in middle school at Flagstaff Academy.

Intrigued, she signed up for a summer robotics class at St. Vrain Valley’s Innovation Center and was hooked. She took more summer camp classes, including an intro to cybersecurity class. In high school, she joined the Innovation Center’s cyber tech student team.

As a cyber tech team member, she has developed curriculum and taught cybersecurity skills to students and senior citizens. She also helps run the Code Zone Challenge coding competition for middle school students, as well as working with a team to design a new cyber bus. The renovated school bus will travel to schools and be used to teach cybersecurity lessons.

While she started as a very shy ninth grader, she quickly built her confidence as she learned to speak publicly at team events and conferences.

“I have the confidence to continue growing and to continue to learn,” she said. “The support and community here is just incredible. I have not yet met a student or teacher who isn’t passionate. It inspires you to do more.”

Outside of the Innovation Center, she has worked as a student intern for the Longmont Area Chamber of Commerce Education Committee and as a student advisory board member of the Kevin Love Fund, which seeks to normalize conversations around mental health.. She was in the International Baccalaureate diploma program at Niwot High, was part of the NASA club and played volleyball.

After graduation, she will attend Colorado State University to study business and computer information systems. She’s considering a career as a project manager and hopes to continue to help people understand cybersecurity.

“I’m excited to graduate,” she said.

At the Innovation Center, 67 seniors from around the district participated in after-school project teams, while 303 seniors took classes. Student project teams are paid, work-based learning opportunities where high school students explore career options through hands-on projects and mentoring from industry professionals.

Sean-Patrick Schmitz, a senior at Erie High School, said his interest in robotics was sparked in sixth grade, when he fell in love with the mechanical engineering involved in designing robots.

Six years ago, he signed up as an early intern at the Innovation Center as part of the underwater robotics team, then moved to the socially assistive robotics team in high school. That team works on modifying robots to help in early education and special education classrooms.

“It’s been a really, really good avenue for me to try to make robots useful,” he said. “This is building things to help real people in the world who are struggling. It’s incredibly rewarding.”

The team’s projects included building a robotic mechanism using a leaf blower so an elementary student in a wheelchair can toss balls with her classmates in gym, as well as adding a bubble blower arm to an assistive robot to use as a reward system in early education classrooms.

At Erie High, he took robotics classes and enrolled in the school’s engineering pathway that culminates with a senior design class. For the class, he designed a drone to collect data before, during and after wildfires as part of the Real World Design Challenge.

In the fall, he will attend the Colorado School of Mines, where he’s considering studying mechanical and aerospace engineering. His goal is to work for NASA or a private company to contribute to the space exploration field.

“I want to use my engineering skills on real issues,” he said.

Luke Hernandez, a senior at Longmont High who is also headed to the School of Mines, focused on robotics at the Innovation Center, though he concentrated on competitive robotics. His robotics team, “Pronounce This,” recently won the top award at the high school VEX World championship.

He started competing in robotics in second grade and kept going through high school.

“It’s a way for me to be creative,” he said. “Each year, there’s a new game for the competition. There are always new challenges and new ways to build and do things. I don’t ever get bored. I’ve loved every minute.”

After the pandemic sidelined robotics his freshman year, he helped restart the robotics at Longmont High as a sophomore. Starting from scratch, he said, meant students were largely on their own to create solutions for the competitions. On the team, he’s a designer and builder, focusing on keeping the robot light, simple and strong.

“I like doing all of the problem solving and designing,” he said.

Outside of robotics, he plays soccer and skis. He also tried Ultimate Frisbee as a sophomore. Along with robotics, his favorite classes are history classes.

Lily Downing, a senior at Skyline High School, started competing on robotics teams in third grade, then joined the Innovation Center’s robotics leadership team as a sophomore. The team sets up the fields, displays and technology at every robotics tournament hosted by the school district, then runs the tournaments. Downing is one of the certified head referees and was invited to referee at the VEX World championship.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s really fun and really rewarding,” she said. “You get to see all the kids and all the robots they’ve been building. It’s really fun to see how excited the kids are to be there.”

Along with working at robotics tournaments on the weekends from October through March, she volunteered at Timberline PK-8, Columbine Elementary and Rocky Mountain Elementary to help with their robotics programs.

“I help with the basics, how to program, how to drive,” she said. “A lot of it is teaching the kids how to problem solve without just giving them the answers.”

She said her work with younger students is a way to share all the skills she learned through robotics, from programming to talking to judges to building a robot from scratch.

“It’s really rewarding to see all the kids have all these opportunities,” she said.

As much as she has loved robotics, she’s going in a different direction for college. She will attend the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds Honors Program and plans to get a bachelor’s degree in business marketing with a minor in astronomy, followed by a master’s in business marketing.

“I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do as a job, but business has such a broad variety of things I can do,” she said. “I am very ready for my next step. I cannot wait to go and move on to college.”

Quinn Sharp, a senior at Niwot High, used his time at the Innovation Center to explore the world of drones. As a freshman, he and a classmate were asked to develop and teach an introduction to drones class for the Innovation Center’s summer program. They created foam drone-building kits that they’re still using and will spend this summer teaching other high school students how to run the classes.

“It’s cool to see how excited kids get about building something that flies,” he said.

He earned his drone pilot license and leads flight operations on the aeronautics team. His main jobs are planning flights, including securing FAA approvals, and flying missions. Along with flying drones for construction and real estate companies, the aeronautics team provides drone flights for other Innovation Center teams.

“Here, you get all this respect and responsibility and training,” he said. “It’s comparable to getting job experience early on. It leads to opportunities beyond just being a St. Vrain student. I had an internship last summer and I got a job offer for this summer.”

Sharp said flying in the foothills and mountains is his favorite type of mission. A recent assignment was to capture ecological changes near Lyons for an Innovation Center team that worked on a fish release project.

“It’s cool to see different areas,” he said. “You can check out canyons and valleys that you otherwise wouldn’t get to see.”

Along with his work at the Innovation Center, he was part of the International Baccalaureate diploma program at Niwot High and was the vice president of the school’s March for Our Lives club.

In the fall, he will attend the University of Colorado Boulder, where he’s planning to major in aerospace engineering. He wants to focus on how humans interact with space, with a goal of helping build the places where astronauts live.

“Over the past year, everything has come together,” he said. “It’s been a good experience.”