About me¶
Hi! I am Yige Li, and you can also call me Sarah. I am an international student from China. I came to the United States 1 year ago, and now I am a 10th grade student in Charlotte Latin School. I enrolled for Fab Academy 2021 because I really want to challenge myself with the topics and contents that I am interested in, including web-design (what I am doing right now:), 2D & 3D modeling, CNC machine, lasercutting, and electronic design. I did not really know engineering before freshmen year. However, when I first selected classes for myself in spring of 2019, I felt like there was a magical power leading me to click this strange course “Engineering I”. At that time, due to the limited English skills, I didn’t even know what engineering is in Chinese. However, this accidental choice accompanied me with a long and sweet experience learning adventure in my first year in the new environment. The accomplishment and satisfaction in creating my own designs really aroused my interest in this new area. So, for this year, here I am!
Visit this website to see my work!
My past¶
I was born in a coastal city called Wenzhou, China. My hometown is a warm and beatiful city in the southeast shore of China. In Wenzhou, there are many streams flowing through my hometown downtown. The antique and exquisite traditional Chinese bridge, which built in Song dynasty, quietly lying in the serene city. There are trees and hills everywhere. When it is in autumn, the whole city just fill with the sweet scent of osmanthus flower. My elementry school is Wenzhou Children Art School. My middle school is Wenzhou Experimental Middle School. I had a really happy and relaxed childhood with my family in Wenzhou. I started to learn English since 6 years old, and I found out that I want to explore the world. So I applied the high school in the United States by myself in the age of 13. I came to study abroad by myself in Charlotte, NC.
I like…¶
I like exploring new things. Food, Music, Challenges, Knowledges…
I am definetly a food-lover. I travelled to 13 countries enjoying different cultures and gourmets. But my favorites are milk tea and hotpot.
If I want to use one word to describe my personality, I would choose optimistic. I am an absolute optimist. An optimistic personality and life attitude have brought me a lot. For example, I am very calm and carefree. You would be hard to find sorrows and hardships in my life. Nothing require excessive worry and concern for me. But at the same time, because of my comfortable attitude towards life, it is difficult for me to be persuaded or stimulated. I usually do things naturally.
Previous work-Smart Moon Night Light¶
After choosing the course “Engineering I” in Charlotte Latin School, I did my first self-designed complete final project-Smart Moon Night Light.
My experience of making my own “little moon” smart nightlight is the main reason leading me to explore the interesting Engineering field. As a person who is afraid of darkness, when I had a chance to design my own engineering project, I chose to make a nightlight without any hesitation.
But also as a novice in engineering, I immediately received a lot of pressure from my blanking previous designing experience. However, I did not give up. I started to look up online instructions about some similar projects, drew countless drafts by hand, and revised them with the sketching applications on my computer. After that, I initiated developing 3D models in Fusion 360. I really enjoyed finding tutorials as well as learning from scratch. Besides, I designed my own traditional Chinese moon scenes and traced them in Corel. I made the hardcover of “little moon” with a laser cutter and a CNC machine. I also learned soldering, Arduino processing, and designing circuit diagrams during making the Neo Pixels circuit for “little moon”. I tested the brightness in the evening and morning so I coded to let “little moon” automatically turn on its “moonlight” at the advent of night.
My final creation, “little moon”, is a cute smart helper at night. The experience of making a smart night light not only breaks my stereotype for engineering, which is a boring subject with monotonous handful assignments, but also teaches me that engineering could bring delightful feelings to people just like music and art too.
I also made a small site for my personal works of engineering in 2019-2020: Sarah Li’s Site