Student showcases math skills for scholarship

October 12, 2017

Guidance counselor Lauri Cunningham had the opportunity to help junior Govinda Puri apply for a different than usual scholarship. Knowing that first semester for seniors is always a busy time, Puri decided to get a head start regarding scholarship applications through Khan Academy’s junior challenge.

“I created a Khan Academy account a year ago. The founder, Sal Khan, sent me an email saying there’s a junior challenge where you participate by sending in a video describing a topic in math or science.”

Khan Academy started sending out emails to their members at the end of August, and the competition ran through the beginning of October.

“At first I was just ignoring it until I saw some part of it saying there was a competition and you could win $250,000. Then I found more information and that’s where I started. It took a while, but my counselor helped me choose my math topic.”

Puri took the challenge as an opportunity to display his math skills. With the help of Cunningham, he chose fibonacci sequence as his topic of choice.

“He’s kind of a self starter and a go getter,” Cunningham said. “I thought, more power to you Govinda, go for it”.

The challenge is worldwide, so it was difficult to find a topic that is unique and stands out. Cunningham suggested the fibonacci sequence to Puri and they did research to find out more information about it.

“We looked it up online and I showed him some pictures of how that occurs in nature but it’s all math related,” Puri said.

Cunningham explained that the combination of the math, and the science and creativity sparked Puri’s interest.

See Puri’s video here: https://youtu.be/FLdDVgi1ykw. One of the factors regarding if Puri is the scholarship recipient depends on the amount of likes the video has.

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