Summer Endeavors: Solvents, Drones and Jump Rope
By Dylan Howlett
Durham Academy students — at DA Summer and elsewhere — don’t see summer as a time of pure idling. It is a time, as we were reminded in October, of action, of growth, of experiences moral, happy and productive.
Just ask three recent alums and three Upper Schoolers who embarked on summertime adventures in 2025 that placed them at the forefront of instrument cleanliness, autonomous navigation and international jump-rope. We hope you will enjoy and draw inspiration from this Double — nay, Triple — Dutch of Summer Endeavors.
The following responses have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Eric Cao ’26
Researching Safe and Effective Cleaning Solvents for Rosin
China
There is, perhaps, no greater irritant for string musicians than the stubborn presence of rosin, the translucent substance most commonly obtained from pine trees that instrumentalists use to treat their bows. Cao knows this sticky situation well: He is an accomplished violist with the North Carolina Chamber Music Institute, and he too endures the seemingly intractable residue that rosin can leave behind. So he set out to find a solution.
I play the viola. Usually when you try to produce sound with the bow, you use a lot of rosin. That rosin is very sticky, and it kind of gets everywhere. It’s really troublesome to remove. I would usually try to clean it up with a cloth, which is the recommended way. But the cloth doesn’t remove everything. Eventually, I would send my instrument to a professional shop to get the viola deep-cleaned.
When I played during orchestra or string quartet rehearsals, I saw that my fellow players would look irritated when they tried to wipe down their instruments. The rosin would touch their hands, and they would rub their fingers in annoyance. My private viola teacher has complained that quite a few of her students do not clean their instruments, and their rationale was that it was a very bothersome process. So I realized that the problem did not just apply to myself.
I did some simple searches online, and I found a few commercial rosin cleaners for sale. I tested them out, but most of them contained a bunch of random chemicals that had a sharp smell. It felt like something that should only be handled by trained professionals. For musicians like me who don’t have as much experience in that department, we’d probably need something safer, something friendlier to our physical health.
In the summer of 2024, between my sophomore and junior year, I returned to China for a family reunion. My dad, Huabin, who’s the general manager at Shanghai Shinchem Chemicals Co., ended up taking me to a gathering of his friends, many of whom work in the chemistry field. I ended up talking with a chemistry professor about the problems with rosin — and that I didn’t have a solution yet. Somehow, to my surprise, he was pretty interested. He got some funds for a project to investigate safe cleaning solutions for rosin. The next thing I knew, I was in the lab with him.
We spent a total of three weeks in his lab in China. We devised our procedure methods and researched some potential candidates for our tests. We also discovered that rosin is not only an aesthetic issue: When too much of it layers up on the soundboard of the instrument, it reduces the ability of the instrument to resonate. We eventually narrowed it down to two candidates: ethanol and turpentine. They’re both eco-friendly solvents that don’t cause harm to the human body, and they’re very effective at cleaning. We put a few drops of each solvent on the surface of the instrument and wiped them down vigorously with a cleaning cloth. We used spectroscopy methods to measure their effectiveness in removing the rosin from the surface, as well as the surface integrity to see whether they would harm the varnish of the instrument.
We found that both solvents were effective at eliminating the rosin residue. But turpentine was better at preserving the varnish than ethanol. After obtaining our results from the lab work, we embarked on a long journey to author a paper. I wrote the main body structure, and my professor polished the language to make it sound more technical, more professional. We were able to finish it in the spring of 2025, and we submitted the manuscript to a Chinese chemistry journal — the title of which translates to “Cleaning World” in English — that focuses on industrial cleaning technologies. Early in the summer of 2025, we found out that the paper had been accepted.
I was really surprised, partly because of the peer review process. They didn’t end up suggesting any changes, which means they thought our paper was well written. And in the summer of 2025, I built on this project a little bit. Once we got the scientific proof that this thing works, I started packaging turpentine into aluminum cans — and because turpentine has a naturally strong smell, we added quite a few varieties of essential oils to neutralize the scent. (My favorite is sweet orange.) I started distributing the cans — somewhere between 10 and 20 — to musicians around me. My private teacher was really glad I did this: She believed in this science, and she started making her students use turpentine to clean their instruments.
It’s been a very fulfilling experience. When I first observed this problem, I never really expected it to go this far: doing all of these experiments, obtaining verifiable results, eventually putting it into practice and helping people. I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank DA. I came to the U.S. from Shanghai when I was in fifth grade. Before then, I was trained as a student in solving the same types of problems with the same strategy and the same process every time. But when I started at DA in seventh grade, I was struck by the amount of open-ended questions without definitive answers. Frankly, I didn’t enjoy it at first. I struggled a lot. But DA has gradually made me into a person more capable of developing my own train of thinking instead of just doing what I’m told. When DA transitioned from AP courses to ADV courses, I initially wasn’t a fan: I still had some of that traditionalist mindset. I gradually came to the realization that it’s not about just solving a problem, getting the answer and moving on. It’s about thinking more independently.
Aarav Prakash ’26
Duke Cyber-Physical Systems Lab
Durham
Two years worth of summer plans crystallized for Prakash during his sophomore year at the Upper School. He met with Lori Reade — then DA’s student development and career exploration counselor — and discussed his abiding interest in engineering.
He was a student in the robotics class that welcomed, with Reade’s support, two visitors and Ph.D. students from Duke University’s Cyber-Physical Systems Lab: Spencer Hallyburton ’14 and David Hunt. Soon, Prakash would see an Upper School daily announcements email that contained a notice for an engineering internship with Duke. Reade believed it would, as Prakash said, “be right up my alley.” His DARC SIDE coaches, Forrest Beck and Zack VanKirk, agreed. “A bunch of different places,” Prakash said, “were pointing me toward it.” That’s how Prakash would spend each of the last two summers at the Cyber-Physical Systems Lab, crossing paths once more with Hallyburton; working closely with Hunt; and overlapping with the internships of two of his closest friends and classmates, Ryan Bauroth ’25 and Cameron Morris ’26.
Prakash intends to study engineering at the University of Virginia, where he will enroll this fall. But he is forever grateful that he landed on the summertime radar of an engineering program at a different ACC school.
Our work was in recreating three-dimensional environments, like a room indoors, and autonomously navigating throughout them. In my first summer there, I worked on a ground vehicle, and the Ph.D. student that I worked with was an expert in radar. And radar isn't typically used in indoor detection environments: It’s mainly a velocity-based detection system, and it's not as precise as other methods. But it is quite a bit cheaper than LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). For example, we had a LiDAR on the ground vehicle that cost around $16,000, but the radars that we had on there cost around $1,000 combined. Our goal was to replace these LiDAR point clouds with radar point clouds and make it a lot cheaper to autonomously navigate without these really fancy, expensive LiDAR.
I also started developing some drone platforms that were modified from a company called DJI, a Chinese drone manufacturer that makes a lot of camera products and related equipment. I have a lot of experience from DARC SIDE with CAD — or computer-aided design, the software that designers and engineers use. I introduced my coworkers in the lab to a couple of new CAD softwares, and getting to showcase my expertise was pretty fun.
Duke has a really cool drone testing room that they call a “drone cage.” It uses something called a Vicon system, or a motion-capture system that a movie studio or a video game studio might use to create special effects or animations. You could see the location of the drone from a Vicon perspective, from a LiDar perspective and from a radar perspective. We were trying to discover if it was possible for a drone to detect another drone for defense purposes. The last couple of days I was working there, we had about 20 of these cool mini drones — about two inches by two inches — that the lab ordered. They had a similar Vicon light system that came with them, and I set up the system for them to do experiments with the mini drones. And then I started doing the preliminary code for it. It was fun to experiment with. I was able to start a drone swarm, with multiple drones at different levels doing different things. I even got to work with a couple of mechanical engineering students to test a photoshoot with the drones. I was manning the disable button because we didn’t know how the smoke machine was going to interact with the optical flow sensor on the bottom of the drones. I had the kill switch right there. That was a fun experience.
In each of the two summers, I got my name on a research paper: One was for those ground vehicles with which we were comparing the use of radar to LiDAR in autonomously navigating spaces. I collected a lot of data by driving ground vehicles: I got to drive a robot around from my seat on a couch in the Wilkinson Engineering Building. The other paper was on the drone platforms that I developed and finalized. I built about eight drones, and then I designed three-dimensional printed mounts for the lab to test different factors.
I found the environment of the lab was very, very welcoming, and it was very creative. It was very innovative in the way I would imagine a research lab. But it was also a lot of fun. I got to experience a lot of cool things, and I learned so much from that experience: about how to communicate with people in a working environment and in a research environment, and how to develop projects.
Taylor Fox ’26, Savanna Levinson ’27, Isabella Ouimet ’29 and Mila Patel ’29
International Jump Rope Union World Jump Rope Championships
Kawasaki, Japan
More than 1,300 athletes from 35 countries competed at the second-ever IJRU World Jump Rope Championships in the summer of 2025. Five of those athletes were DA students: Fox, Levinson, Ouimet, Patel and Farrah Abd-El-Khalick ’31.
None of them had been to Japan before. Each had emerged from a daunting field of more than 300 potential American qualifiers to earn the right to represent the U.S., which would finish fifth at the World Championships. The Middle Schooler and four Upper Schoolers jumped against paid and experienced professionals, some of whom receive funding from their national federation, or earn money from sponsorship agreements, or have competed on the international circuit for three decades.
But the handful of DA-affiliated participants had soaring confidence in their own near-daily training regimens with local clubs: Fox, Levinson and Ouimet all compete with the Bouncing Bulldogs, a Durham-based competitive jump rope team and community-oriented nonprofit. They would bring that same sense of community nearly 7,000 miles around the world, where they traded T-shirts, autographs and souvenir pins with athletes from far-flung places who shared a long-held belief: Jump rope is a sport with which to be reckoned. By the end of the eight-day competition, more than a million viewers would tune into a livestream of the championships.
Fox: We started making up our team in September. The entire year, that’s all we worked on. We worked on training for qualifiers in February. Then once we were qualified, we really focused on those 10 events or so that we were competing in.
Levinson: We had trained seven days a week, five hours a day. Taylor and I were part of this routine called Team Show, which is 12 people in six minutes with all five different styles of jump rope. It’s the hardest for us.
Ouimet: During the summer, we have really long training days: five days per week for at least an hour and a half, and then we also practice on the weekends. You have to have the ability to sustain energy for a long time.
Fox: I'm obviously very passionate about jump rope, but I want to share it with the community and spread awareness of it. A lot of people are like, “Oh, you do jump rope? Like, the stuff you do on the playground during recess?’” It's way different than that. It is an international sport. We have more than 1,300 athletes at this one competition from all over the world. Our team does a lot to focus on our community. We do shows and performances at a bunch of different events, and then we have after-school programs that we also focus on. For me, it’s about getting people more aware and letting people understand that it is actually a real sport. That’s my whole goal with doing all of these competitions.
Levinson: There’s the whole exercise part: It’s a great way to maintain fitness. I’m with all of my friends, which is really fun. The personal aspect is big. I love doing it with my friends. It’s great exercise. Being able to reach different communities — in Durham, in Winston-Salem, in random places — and spread our love for jump rope with a greater community and see the smiles on the faces of little kids who jump rope is just so rewarding.
Ouimet: I have found the sport super fun my entire life. I build so many relationships through it, and I have so many people who I care about so deeply. It just adds to the sport that I already enjoy and makes me feel like it’s something that I’m always excited to do.
Patel: For me, it’s the community of friends. We build each other up and encourage each other. And it’s also the community in the sport. While we were in Japan, we met athletes from other countries and traded shirts and pins with each other. I got signatures from athletes around the world on the back of a shirt.
Fox: Individually, everyone is obviously competitive, but I feel like the one thing with jump rope is that all of the athletes really are there to support each other. Even if you’re competing against someone, you’re still best friends with them at the end of the day. Even if they live in a different country or train differently than you do, or are maybe even better than you, everyone is just constantly supporting each other. It’s positive. It’s uplifting.
Ouimet: Most assume it’s one thing: jumping with a single rope. And honestly, that’s probably what we work on the least in practice. Patel: So many people assume it’s just a neighborhood game where you go out with your friends and you just randomly skip — but it’s much more than that.
Fox: Yeah, or a recess game. That’s what people always think of: It’s like Cinderella. See how many jumps you get. But there are 15 different events, and there are so many different styles. One of them is called Chinese wheel: You have two people and two rows, and you alternate and cross. That’s very different from doing normal jumps.
Levinson: For me, my experience in Japan was just motivation. My next world championships will be my senior year in Oslo, Norway. Going to the competition in Japan and seeing the best of the best is just motivation for me to strive to be as good as they are, and to keep working every day toward that goal. Being able to go to new places and see new things through the sport that we love is such a great learning experience.
Fox: We trained for the World Championships from September through July. Every single day, we put so much into it, and we got a lot out of it. It was an incredible experience. Not many people can say they’ve been to Japan to compete in a world jump rope competition. It’s so much more than jump rope: It’s community, it’s building connections, it’s cheering on your teammates, it’s supporting your friends. After everything we put in, it was such a rewarding experience to compete on the world stage.
Know any Durham Academy students, families or educators who have a mission-driven summer in store? Tell us! Email communications@da.org with more info.