Senior Honors Art Students Use Tumblr as Project Workspace

Upper School Honors Art Seniors are in the midst of an intensive artist in residency project guided by GA Alum and professional designer, Clay Kippen. He has been working with our students here on campus, through online support, and through media conferencing to help seniors develop new insight into their creativity and art making in general.  Emphasizing design thinking processes, collaboration, and play, students are making art in response to one prompt per day through the month of April. You can see what our artists are making each day by clicking here.

Upper School Students Head to Nationals for Sea Perch Engineering Competition

"Teaching 21st Century Students to Read," Rebecca Burnett

US English Chair, Rebecca Burnett has been re-imagining how to teach literature in an age when "informational texts" have supplanted literature in a well-intentioned, but, she believes, misguided effort to make readings in class relevant to students' lives.  GA's approach works to achieve the same ends, but does so in a different way.  Click here to read an article authored by Burnett for The national Association of Independent Schools.

Statistics in Action

Students in Rith Carver's Statistics in Action course are partnering with Mural Arts to help the organization collect and understand data about community impact of their art installations.  Earlier this year, students visited the organization and heard from key players including Director of their Porch Light program and GA alum, Laure Biron.

Students Engineer Sea Glide Submergible Device with Mike Kelly

Upper School Engineers Off to Nationals!

On Saturday, March 18th, ten of GA’s Engineering (H) students participated in two robotics competitions: the SeaPerch Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Challenge and the SeaGlide Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Challenge. Our team won so many awards! The biggest trophy was for the SeaPerch Overall and Contract Award. Other awards for SeaPerch included: 1st in the Pool Performance (and a chance to go to Nationals), 2nd in the Engineer’s Notebook, and 6th in the Presentation Category. There were over 30 high schools in SeaPerch this year, and our ROV was the only one to complete the new “Pipeline” Challenge!T hese honors have earned GA's engineering class an invitation to attend the national competition later this spring.

US Rocketry Students begin Designing for Competition Season

Hour of Code

Mapping Your DIgital World: 10th Grade Health Classes Engage in Digital Citizenship Curriculum

 

Students in upper school sophomore health class spent sessions in the Beard Center for Innovation thinking about four key aspects of digital citizenship - relationships, self image and identity, digital footprint and reputation.   The focus of this exercise was to utilize case studies and discussion as a means of thinking about digital tools and the online world as forces for creating positive change in the world.  Students also engaged in this work as a way to shift the conversation about digital citizenship from lecturing about what NOT to do in the online world, and to instead focus on what is positive and possible.

 

Entrepreneur Student Brainstorm Business Ideas

Early Innovators Program at SAP

The SAP early Innovators Program is a joint pilot project between the software giant SAP and GA.  Thirty students middlea nd upper school students spent the day at SAP North American Headquarters in Newtown Square where they had the opportunity to practice Design Thinking and entrepreneurship by working with SAP's Value Assurance and Social Selling professionals to solve challenges related to leveraging social networks for engagement and branding. Charrele Robinson-Brown a GA parent and SAP's Director of the Innovation Team  - Global Marketing, Experiential Marketing & Strategic Programs has been working for over a year to bring the program to fruition. In addition to three work sessions designed around team building, design thinking, and business challenges, the students teams met to decide how to spend the $5000 gift SAP made to the school.  The professionals at SAP were so impressed with our students comportment, creativity, and business savvy, that Ms Brown remarked, "I would hire any one of these students.  They are just amazing.  And I can see SAP adopting many of their ideas."

The New Community Project Partners with Lower School PE Classes

Students in the upper school New Community Project class partnered with the lower school PE classes recently as part of their field work for their 2016-17 work with Community Partnership School.  One of the research and design opportunities for students is to build recess opportunities for children in an urban setting with limited space. Working with the lower school gave students the opportunity to understand the role of play, the need for recess, and child agency.

Kids teaching Kids: Noodle Robots

You are never to young to study robotics. This pool noodle robot is a simple take on the “vibrobot”, a robot that is controlled by a single vibrating motor. The materials? A piece of pool noodle and the motor from a battery-powered toothbrush! The outcome? A self-built vibrobot!

Our Kindergarten students are participants GA’s Young Engineers initiative. Together with their upper school KTK buddies, they build fun projects that foster knowledge and skills related to science, technology, and engineering. We aim to instill a “do-it-yourself” attitude in our youngest students so they feel empowered to explore, tinker and try to make things themselves.

US Engineering Students Win Big At Sea Perch Competition

GA US engineering students with the help of physics teacher Diane Goldstein and GA's Mike Kelly, took 2nd place at The Greater Philadelphia Sea Perch Challenge at Temple University from a field of 25 teams in the "Vehicle Performance" Category, which is a competition that includes and obstacle course and a "crane mission - electromagnet - challenge". This regional win qualified GA for the national competition.

Diane Goldstein, US teacher of physics and engineering notes "I first entered GA as part of my first robotics minimester 3 years ago. We entered last year as part of the Engineering (H) class, and now this year as part of a mini-mester and engineering class. This is a relatively inexpensive competition that looks seemingly simple, but is actually very sophisticated. This year's Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) had to maneuver an long underwater obstacle course as well as use an electromagnet to pick up metal debris and place in a basket. We built our own working electromagnet from some YouTube instructions, and I had the obstacle course built by students in the first minimester.  The competition was the last major project introduced in the Engineering class, and this build introduced the kids to soldering and electrical components, as well as learning how to waterproof motors underwater. Finally, each group had to keep an Engineer's Notebook as well as put together a PowerPoint or Poster presentation.

The craft that we entered posted the best times in the obstacle course in the GA pool. We then retrofitted that craft with the electromagnet and practiced that portion in the pool as well.

All of the "missions" are put together to reflect the needs of the Navy - one of the major sponsors of the competition. Each year the second challenge changes significantly to keep it fresh.

So, of our class of 16 students, Tyler Andra and Tyler Hook represented us on the pool deck. Tyler Andra was the driver and Tyler Hook was the tether man. In some way, all of the class definitely contributed to the final project.

I was thrilled to see the team win the prestigious second place trophy for Vehicle Performance. In truth, we do tons of hand-on work and enter several competitions throughout the year in this class, and it is really fun to simply win sometimes! So many times, after a competition, I am thinking how we can do it better next year, and trying to figure out what went wrong - so a good result just feels great!"

AP Physics BC Use the Beard Center for Problem Solving

Upper School AP Physics C students (calculus-based University Physics), use the BCI to work collaboratively on problems in an area called electrodynamics--the relationships between time-varying electric and magnetic fields.  "This material represents the culmination of the work that we've done this year---it is very abstract and very mathematical.  It's been especially hard on the students since, with most of them being seniors and with final exams starting, they are being pulled in all different directions at once, so they get to this really difficult material at a time when they are really stretched thin and stressed out." reports Vic Montemeyor, GA's new physics teacher,  "But they've been doing a great job dealing with the balancing act---they're an awesome group of students...!"