Project Invent Team XARKA—consisting of Ryan Lee, Avy Agrawal, Avi Goldschmidt, Kyle Tie, and Xander Shotz—received the prestigious Moonshot Award at this year’s Project Invent Demo Day, held on the final day of school! This marks the second consecutive year a Woodward team has earned such an honor.

Team XARKA developed an innovative attendance-scanning system aimed at modernizing and simplifying attendance tracking for the Upper School's Maymester program. Their project included:

• Technology integration: The system uses facial recognition or QR-code scanning (the team showcased both with live campus demos) to automatically mark student attendance.
• Seamless implementation: Installed at classroom entrances, the device instantly logs arrivals and departures, reducing teacher workload and eliminating manual attendance entry.
• Instant reporting: A dashboard displays real-time attendance data for teachers and administrators, streamlining record-keeping and making it easier to identify tardiness or absences.
• Privacy-conscious design: Built with local data processing to ensure student information remains secure and compliant with privacy protocols.

In their submission video, the students walked through the full development journey—from identifying frustrations in traditional roll-call methods to prototyping the scanner and conducting pilot tests, which resulted in significantly faster check-ins.

Their efforts earned them a $500 award to support continued innovation through Woodward’s Technology Club—and, importantly, an invitation to the National Innovation Challenge, where they’ll compete with top young innovators across the country.