Putting the STEM in “student,” 7 students on campus hit the Dallas Regional Science and Engineering Fair recently to present their projects to a panel of judges, with two groups being awarded for their efforts. 

Behind these two projects were seniors Sarthak Dhawan and Satvik Duddukuru, who won fourth place with their creation of QuantCraft: Simplifying Quantum Computing Education with Virtual Reality, and senior Vishnu Vasudev, with his first-prize project: the Selection of site-specific nanobodies against auto-ADP-ribosylated PARP1.

For Duddukuru, the inspiration behind his Quantcraft project began through a summer internship. 

“Sarthak and I were both interning at StateFarm’s technology headquarters in Richardson last summer,” Duddukru said. “We were thinking about what we wanted to create and realized that the field of quantum computing has many applications but is very difficult to understand. Quantum computers are based on qubits, which are often represented as 3D vectors around a sphere. We felt that virtual reality would be an ideal platform to help people visualize an inherently three-dimensional figure, so we created QuantCraft as a VR puzzle game.”

Though it started at the science fair, Quantcraft has even turned into future plans for both Duddukru and Dhawan this summer. 

“Both Savtik and I will be working as interns at StateFarm again this year and Savtik will specifically be working with their Quantum Labs team,” Dhawan said. “We are both very excited to have the opportunity to educate the next generation of quantum programmers and hope that the program will be beneficial to them as well. Quantum computing is going to be extremely influential in the next few years, but currently, it is extremely difficult to approach without a doctorate or equivalent experience. QuantCraft aims to address this issue by reducing this barrier to entry.”