ACADEMY FORMATH, ENGINEERING & SCIENCE ‘To Whom It May Concern: Lam very pleased to have the opportunity to write a letter of evaluation on behalf of Mark Van der Merwe. Mark has been a very active member of the AMES Amperes, the school’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) robotics team. He has been a very valuable asset to our team, in particular for our programing sub team. Mark began to distinguish himself on our robotics team his sophomore year when he was tasked with creating the vision processing code for the robot’s autonomous period. He did so under the direction of a senior programming student who recognized Mark’s abilities in programming and felt that he was up to the task. Mark had not created a code such as this up to that point in time and he used the opportunity to expand his personal programming knowledge considerably and was able to deliver a strong code to the team. Mark’s junior year he was the obvious choice for the assistant leadership position on the robotics programming team. Working with another student, Mark created programming lessons that ‘would reach students of all skill levels. For several month prior to the start of the robotics build season, Mark and this other student would teach their lessons once a week to any AMES students that were interested in learning basic programming skills or were interested in enhancing their programming knowledge, not only those students that were on the robotics team. This school ‘year Mark is our programming team lead and he has continued to teach these lessons once a ‘week to prepare our team for the competition season. We recognize that there are many local teams that lack sufficient programming experience for the FRC competitions so Mark indicated that he was open to inviting students from other local teams to participate in his lessons. One of his most active students is a man named Louis, an adult mentor for another local FRC team. Louis has shared with me several times that he is incredible impressed with the quality of Mark's Tessons as well as Mark’s ability to teach the material and to answer his questions. It has been a tremendous experience for me as one of Mark’s mentors to see him reach out so willingly to our rivals to try to improve their programs, in addition to working to perfect our own, personally have trusted in Mark's teaching skills to the point that I invited him to participate in RoboFest as a presenter. RoboFest was a high school robotics conference put on by four local robotics teams, ‘The intent was to teach local students and mentors about the various aspects that g0 into building a robot for the FRC competition. We paired Mark with an adult mentor who is a software engineer for a local company. Mark was the only presenter at the conference that was still in high school. Alll other technical presenters were professional educators and engineers. AN EARLY COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOL PARTNERED WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH 5715 SOUTH 1300 FAST + SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84121 * PHONE: 801.278.9460 * FAX: 801.277.3527 * WWWAMESSLCORGThe feedback that I received about Mark’s performance after the conference was tremendous. His workshops were consistently the best attended throughout the day and several mentors and students have asked if they could use Mark as a mentor for their own teams. To better help the teams that are unable to attend his programming lessons Mark decided to put his lessons online for anyone to access. I have consistently been very pleased with the professionalism and grace with which Mark has conducted himself as a representative of our team. Tam very pleased that I have had the opportunity to work with Mark throughout the past three years. 1 know that he is a wonderful candidate for your program. He is a very determined, very bright young man and a wonderful leader and example to his peers. I know that he will be a wonderful addition to your program, Sara a, A ‘, Math and Physics Instructor Academy for Math, Engineering, and Science