During the summer after my junior year of high school, I worked as a consultant programmer at the Concord Consortium, a non-profit company whose goal is to improve teaching and learning through technology. At Concord, I worked on the Seismic Explorer software, which was developed as part of the National Science Foundation funded project, Geological Models for Explorations of the Dynamic Earth (GEODE). Seismic Explorer allows students to explore visualization of up-to-the-minute, worldwide earthquake data from the United States Geological Survey, data about rates of plate motion, and historic data about volcanic eruptions.

My work on Seismic Explorer included redrawing the plate boundaries as a visualization layer, assigning different colors to boundary types (convergent, divergent and transform), and making sure representations remained accurate at different zoom levels. In addition, I added a vector arrows layer to represent rates and directions of plate motion. I revised the software’s menu to include the new features. I also spent some time identifying and fixing bugs.

Seismic Explorer was developed for the web using JavaScript, NodeJS, and React.