Engineering Sciences · Dartmouth College ’28
MAZVITANHIDZA
Hello, I'm an Engineering Sciences student at Dartmouth College, based in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Open to Internships
An arcade game running on an FPGA, a suspension setup for a racing car, a pipeline that read 10,000 posts about the LA wildfires. Three different subjects, same job each time: get it working, then figure out why it works.
- in the worldA-Level CS
- 6th
- students taughtDartmouth COSC 1
- 200+
- posts processedQSS Lab research
- 10k+
- vehicle dynamicsDartmouth Formula Racing
- Co-Lead
/ projects.
Six projects, four disciplines
Where a demo exists it is live, not a screenshot. Play it.
Whack-A-Mole FPGA
- A playable arcade game in VHDL, running on real hardware out to a VGA monitor.
- Finite state machines, sprite rendering, joystick input and a seven-segment score.
Built a fully playable arcade game in VHDL, running on an FPGA with live VGA display output. Designed finite state machines for game logic, sprite rendering modules for moles and hammers, joystick input handling, and a score system output to seven-segment displays. Completed as a team with Alisha Qureshi and Vishal Powell for ENGS 31.
/ try it.
SCORE
00
TIME
30
ACC
100%
Click a mole, or press keys 1 to 9
/ control fsm.
S0 · IDLE
Waiting on start. VGA holds the title screen, score register cleared.
Same ruleset, rebuilt for the browser. The diagram below is the actual control FSM from the VHDL.
LA Fires: Climate Conversation Analysis
- Research intern at Dartmouth's QSS Lab under Prof. Herbert Chang.
- Mapped how hashtag communities formed around the LA wildfires across 10,000+ posts.
Research intern at Dartmouth's QSS Lab under Prof. Herbert Chang. Built an NLP pipeline over 10,000+ social media posts about the Los Angeles wildfires, mapping how hashtag communities formed around climate discourse. Processing and feature extraction in Python and Pandas, network graphs in Matplotlib. The graphs below are the output: dense cores around #lafires and #climatechange, with satellite clusters showing where conversations stayed separate.
/ try it.
/ live pipeline.
Stage 02 · Tokenise (18)
Stage 03 · Feature weights
- sensational lexicon+0.22
- conspiratorial framing+0.30
- absolute certainty+0.20
- urgency marker+0.18
- punctuation intensity+0.12
Stage 04 · Classification
Simplified demonstration using a transparent lexicon so every score is explainable. The research pipeline used trained classifiers across 10,000+ posts.
A simplified version of the pipeline. Type anything and every feature that moved the score is shown.
Nuggets
- A multi-client game server in C, written from scratch over UDP.
- Handles concurrent players, message parsing and game state with no framework underneath.
Built a multi-client dungeon game server in C over UDP. It implements the NUGGETS protocol: players join a shared grid, collect gold, and compete in real time across concurrent connections. No frameworks underneath it: the networking, memory management and protocol are all hand-written in C.
/ try it.
Simulated traffic illustrating the protocol. The server itself is written in C, handling concurrent clients over UDP with no framework.
Simulated protocol traffic, including the dropped datagrams UDP does nothing to prevent.
Dartmouth Formula Racing
- Vehicle Dynamics Co-Lead on the Formula SAE team, from first year.
- Suspension geometry, load transfer modelling, SolidWorks, and TiG welding on the build.
Vehicle Dynamics Co-Lead and Aerodynamics member on Dartmouth's Formula SAE team. Responsible for suspension geometry analysis, load transfer modeling, and component design in SolidWorks. The team competes against 500+ college students internationally. Also involved in fabrication including TiG welding. Started in first year, currently co-leading the dynamics subteam.
/ try it.
/ lateral load transfer.
Formula
ΔW = (W · a · h) / t
W = 550 lb (car + driver)
Load distribution, front axle
Transfer
151 lb
55% of static axle load has moved to the outer tyre.
The calculation that sets roll stiffness on the car. Move the sliders.
PawPal+
- A scheduling system in Python that fits pet-care tasks into the day's spare minutes.
- Priority sort, conflict detection, recurring tasks, a RAG module and a full test suite.
An applied AI scheduling system for pet care, built in Python with a Streamlit interface. Tasks carry a two-tier priority, and a greedy time-budget scheduler fits them into the day's available minutes, pinning fixed appointments and filling the gaps with flexible ones. Completing a task auto-spawns its next occurrence, and overlapping windows raise a conflict. Includes a RAG module and a full pytest suite with coverage.
SwimSafe
- Swimmers with epilepsy or a cardiac history drown if they lose consciousness, and the discreet safety belts on sale have to be pulled by hand.
- SwimSafe inflates on its own: 257 N of buoyancy against the belt's 102 N, and it holds the wearer face-up.
A five-person ENGS 21 team project. Recreational swimmers with a history of cardiac events or epilepsy can lose consciousness in the water and drown. Life jackets work but are bulky. The discreet alternative, a CO2 belt, has to be pulled by hand, which makes it useless for exactly the person it is sold to. SwimSafe activates on its own. Benchmarked against an Onyx belt, it gave 257 N of added buoyancy against the belt's 102 N, inflated in 3.12 seconds against 4.47, and held a strong face-up orientation where the belt needed manual adjustment. The team weighted orientation as heavily as buoyancy in their spec, on the reasoning that flotation is not enough if the wearer's mouth and nose are not above water. Built with Keion Grieve, James Cunningham, Asghar Qanit and Tahjae Jackson.
/ about.
About
I teach Dartmouth's intro CS course to about 200 students, co-lead vehicle dynamics on the Formula Racing team, and turn up for SWE and WiCS. Before any of that I sat A-Levels in Zimbabwe and came top in the country for Computer Science, sixth in the world.
Software
Built multiplayer game servers in C over UDP, NLP classification pipelines in Python, and object-oriented systems in Java. Low-level networking, memory management, no abstractions.
Hardware
Designed and implemented a fully playable FPGA game in VHDL with VGA output. Built suspension geometry in SolidWorks for a Formula SAE car. TiG welding, Raspberry Pi, soldering.
Research
Research intern at Dartmouth's QSS Lab, building pipelines over 10,000+ posts to map how climate conversations formed online. I also TA the intro course for 200+ students. The research and the teaching pull in the same direction: explaining a system to someone who has not seen it yet.
/ experience.
Sept 2025 – Present
Teaching Assistant, COSC 1
Dartmouth College
Supporting ~200 students in Dartmouth's intro CS course. Running weekly recitations, holding office hours, and grading in Python.
Jan – June 2025
Research Intern
Dartmouth QSS Lab
Built an NLP pipeline for misinformation classification under Prof. Herbert Chang. Processed 10,000+ posts using Python, Pandas, and Matplotlib.
May 2025 – Present
International Student Mentor
Dartmouth College
Supporting incoming international students through the transition to Dartmouth.
Sept 2023 – Sept 2024
Student Intern and Ambassador
Educait
Coordinated hackathons that introduced machine learning and AI to primary and high school students. Ran troubleshooting sessions to fix bugs in the platform, and designed the onboarding curriculum for new ambassadors.
Apr – May 2022
IT Summer Intern
Rubiem Innovations
/ education.
Sept 2024 – June 2028
Dartmouth College
BA Engineering Sciences
Coursework: Software Design, Data Structures, Object-Oriented Programming, Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Mechanics, Electromagnetism.
2018 – 2023
Arundel School, Zimbabwe
CIE A-Levels
A*A*A in Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics.
- Top in Zimbabwe, AS Computer Science
- 6th in the world, A-Level Computer Science
/ skills.
- Programming
- Java, C, Python
- Hardware
- VHDL / FPGA, SolidWorks, Raspberry Pi, TiG Welding, Soldering
- Tools
- Pandas, Matplotlib, Git
- Languages
- English (fluent), Shona (native), French (intermediate)
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