“I found a passion pretty early on in life: there’s videos of me when I was two and there’s a screwdriver in my pocket. Sometimes I stay in the robotics lab until 7 just hanging out in there. So the day before this pep rally, Ms. Wilner comes up to the robotics” lab begging for a T-shirt cannon. I went to Lowe’s and I thought of it in the store and I assembled it in the store. Most of my knowledge comes from YouTube. You just need something to hold the air, something to release the air, something to hold the T-shirt. The ingredients: plumbing stuff, some sprinkler pipes, some sprinkler valves. I just like helping people. At school, I figured out how to unlock the thermostats and use the Apple TV and my friends saw and all spread the word. Soon I was the teacher’s choice if there’s a problem, ‘Oh Ronell, fix it.’” — Ronell Zahir, 9th grade