MS Students Prep for Science Fair in the Beard Center for Innovation

GA at Greater Philadelphia Youth Entrepreneur Expo

GA Upper School students participated in the Greater Philadelphia Youth Entrepreneurship Expo in the spring competing with regional high school students for best new business ideas.  Both attended Ashoka Catapult earlier in the year and have since developed business models. H McDonnell '16 of Threaded (a clothing company that generates income for non-profits) and A Seidman '16 of Sensei (a sensor for wheelchairs) developed two of the most exciting and winning business ideas at the event.

4th Grade Coding Project

Using specially designed Learning Carpets fourth grade students use the grid to understand and manipulate basic coding sequence.  Lower School teacher Sue McHugh created lines of code that students had to read and replicate by placing colored balls in the correct spots on gridded carpets.  One child was the “navigator” who read the code aloud to the “driver” who followed the code and placed the colored balls in the correct spots.  After they were finished, they could check their work against the answer key.  As a next step, students placed the balls on the carpet and wrote their own code to get the driver from ball to ball."  As a special challenge, McHugh showed the children that they could create barriers to block certain pathways and make their friends create alternate routes for arriving at the correct ball.  Amanda Mitchel, GA's new Early Childhood Education specialist reported, "I thought this was a fantastic example of engaged learning."

Design Thinking at the Heart of Middle School Summer Reading Day

Middle School students and faculty all participated in a design thinking project related to Counting By 7s, their summer reading book written by Holly Sloan.  Their goal was to have students reflect of who they are and what matters most to them and to share that with a cohort of their peers across grade levels.  Head Advisers, Dion Lehman, Kate Cassidy, and Bayard Templeton,  developed the program to be a great community building exercise.  "The entire school was involved in the same activity, and a major part of that activity was to get to know someone in a new and deeper way.  The activity required students to model many parts of our mission statement, from being confident in expression to being collaborative in action," reports Lehman, "Our hope is that as students and teachers get more comfortable with the defined Design Thinking process and the terminology, it will continue to be a tool our middle school teachers encourage students to use to approach solutions to questions and problems."

Summer Reading:Breaking in the Maker Space

Even while in the last phases of construction, upper school students were already taking advantage of the new maker space in the Beard Center For Innovation during summer reading day.