At the festival hosted in their hometown of Louisiana, both Jackson and Johnson received recognition for their abilities to discover greater possibilities — and were given new electronics by AT&T’s Dream in Black to help them succeed while enrolled in college. During the festival, 200 free laptops were distributed to New Orleans locals in partnership with community organizations.

Genius black girls: Calcea Johnson & Ne’Kiya Jackson, both in high school in Louisiana, worked together to figure out a new way of proving the Pythagorean theorem, a 2,000-year-old math concept that hasn’t been expounded upon since.

Jackson says they spent “3-4 hours a day”… pic.twitter.com/KeWCDpzh8r

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“This is just all very shocking to me,” Johnson told PEOPLE. “I didn’t expect our work to go anywhere. Then all these people started picking it up and wanted to interview me and wanted me to go here and there. I’m just like; I didn’t expect any of it.”

Earlier this year, the two standout students, Johnson and Jackson from St. Mary’s Academy, proved that there is a new method to solving the Pythagorean theorem.

“There was a bonus question that was to create a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem,” Johnson said.

“It’s really an unparalleled feeling, honestly, because there’s just nothing like being able to do something that people don’t think young people can do,” Johnson told Black Wall Street. “A lot of times you see this stuff, you don’t see kids like us doing it.”

The two broke down trigonometry based on the original Pythagoras’ Theorem formula: A^2 + B^2 = C^2. The old formula states that the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides of a right triangle equals the sum of the square of the hypotenuse.

Although they closed out their senior year with a bang, both Jackson and Johnson are ready to move on and attend college.

“My next step is at Xavier University,” Jackson said. “I’m majoring in prepharmacy chemistry.”