Every builder below is an identity-verified US participant aged 13–18. Projects are ranked by Stardance’s paired-comparison peer vote, Hackatime-tracked hours, and the staff “Super Star” flag — awarded to 132 of the program’s 62,223 projects.
Ten projects, roughly in order. The first two are the two highest peer-rated ships in Stardance from any participant, anywhere.
peer score 8.25, 99.5th pct52 h trackedshipped & approved
#1 of every scored ship in Stardance
Brings the iPhone Dynamic Island to Windows as a real shell extension — notifications, media, and banners docked into a floating notch. The highest peer-rated project any participant shipped, anywhere in the program.
peer score 8.13, 99.5th pct81 h trackedshipped & approved
#2 of every scored ship in Stardance
A text scripting language for Scratch. He wrote the transpiler in TypeScript, compiling source down to Scratch's .sb3 project format, and shipped the compiler as a public npm package.
peer score 7.88, 98.9th pct34 h trackedshipped & approved
Clean-room e-ink reader firmware for the XTEINK X4, written because the existing firmwares were bloated and slow. Optimized for reading and nothing else; flashes in under ten seconds.
peer score 7.75, 98.4th pct48 h trackedshipped & approved
Minecraft shipped a new post-effect shader pipeline for resource packs. He read the spec, decided it could be misused, and built a complete playable game that runs inside it.
peer score 7.75, 98.3th pct70 h trackedshipped & approved
A cross-platform 2D/3D fractal engine: decoupled Qt6/OpenGL pipeline, 64-bit precision, and an asynchronous micro-tile rendering matrix that reaches 32k scale without exhausting the GPU. The same teenager is separately 142 hours into slate, a full Vulkan/C++ 3D game engine.
peer score 7.63, 97.8th pct50 h trackedshipped & approved
A Prange-style information-set-decoding attack on the syndrome decoding problem — the hardness assumption under code-based post-quantum cryptography — accelerated on purpose-built hardware.
peer score 7.38, 97.0th pct84 h trackedshipped & approved
A compiled, self-bootstrapping low-level programming language — the compiler is written in the language it compiles.
peer score 7.63, 98.0th pct166 h trackedshipped & approved
Natural selection, evolution, and genetic engineering, simulated. 166 hours across 35 public devlogs.
202 h trackedin progress
A continuously variable transmission that is fully geared and bi-directional — no belts, no friction drive. 202 hours of mechanical design across 30 devlogs, the largest hardware effort by any American teenager in the program.
394 h trackedshipped & approved
An audio visualizer, and the single largest sustained effort by an American teenager in Stardance: 394 tracked hours across 51 devlogs.
The space-adjacent work, split by whether it flies or simulates.
peer score 6.13155 h trackedshipped & approved
A sub-$600 autonomous quadcopter that finds wildfires: Raspberry Pi companion computer over MAVLink, self-designed chassis in Onshape, custom flight-controller PCB in KiCad. The devlogs are the real story — he built a breadth-first web scraper to assemble a fire dataset, hand-labeled it, trained his own TensorFlow model, benchmarked it against aerial wildfire footage, found it was locking onto smoke miles from the actual fire, threw it out and moved to YOLO. Six separate devlogs go to chasing one dead motor through three ESCs, new wiring, and finally a bad board.
peer score 6.75113 h trackedshipped & approved
A real-time operating system written from scratch for a 200 mph drone's flight controller. Hybrid cooperative/preemptive scheduler, PendSV context switching, a FIFO stack for nested interrupts, circular DMA hitting 0.03 ms response, CRSF telemetry framing, an NMEA GPS parser, a BMP390 barometer driver, and MSP OSD output to a Walksnail video transmitter. He validated it in the Renode emulator after QEMU turned out not to model his MCU. This is professional embedded engineering.
37 h trackedin progress
An overactuated aerial-manipulation quadcopter: thrust-vectoring tilt pods give each rotor single-axis pitch, cancelling the disturbance torques induced by a two-jointed (shoulder and elbow) DYNAMIXEL arm slung beneath it. Fully animated in CAD.
37 h trackedin progress
Thrust vector control with throttle arms, landing propulsively the way Falcon 9 does.
44 h trackedin progress
A fully parameterized, automated liquid rocket engine design toolkit.
33 h trackedin progress
Designing a compact rocket flight computer — and the airframe to fly it on.
118 h trackedin progress
An Arduino Mega Mars rover with manual and autonomous driving modes. A servo sweeps an ultrasonic sensor left, centre and right to compare paths; failsafe logic distinguishes a clear path from a marginal one rather than trusting any single reading, and a retrace system lets it back out of a bad situation instead of simply stopping. He taught himself C++, CAD, soldering and hardware debugging over 17 devlogs to build it.
39 h trackedin progress
An open-source astrophotography GoTo mount with automatic polar alignment, built from lasercut aluminium, extrusion and printed parts.
23 h trackedin progress
A long-range UAV designed around a 1 kg ISR payload and a one-hour loiter time.
peer score 7.38, 96.8th pct24 h trackedshipped & approved
A working miniature Mars rover, modelled and published for anyone to print and build.
30 h trackedin progress
A satellite designed around an easy-repair architecture so the same bus can be serviced and reflown.
peer score 7.50, 96.9th pct24 h trackedshipped & approved
A suite of night-sky imaging tools packaged as an offline-capable PWA, because the places you do astrophotography from do not have signal.
peer score 7.25, 96.2th pct4 h trackedshipped & approved
A 3D orbital physics simulation for autonomous satellite debris avoidance — onboard computer vision plus vector pathfinding, aimed squarely at Kessler syndrome.
peer score 7.50, 97.1th pct17 h trackedshipped & approved
Live satellite tracking, built after he finished SkyTrace, the same idea for aircraft.
peer score 6.388 h trackedshipped & approved
Compiled NASA's JSBSim flight dynamics model to WebAssembly and wrote a TypeScript SDK on top, so flight dynamics run in a browser tab.
35 h trackedin progress
A space mission planning game that runs actual NASA simulation software for its physics.
peer score 6.756 h trackedshipped & approved
Pulls live data straight from the James Webb Space Telescope archive into an interactive explorer.
peer score 6.6324 h trackedshipped & approved
A NASA rocket-building simulator. He also built a real-time space intelligence dashboard on top of six NASA APIs.
peer score 6.7563 h trackedshipped & approved
Explore how human physiology would actually fare on specific catalogued exoplanets.
peer score 6.8811 h trackedshipped & approved
The site for the rocketry club at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.