Middle School Students Prototype Solar Ovens

Maker Activities in Upper School Bio Ethics

The Biology Honors students begin the year with a project exploring bioethical topics that are currently in the news. Student groups create a newspaper “Debate” page articulating the facts and opposing opinions. They also include a political cartoon and quotations from members of our diverse GA community.

Designer babies, hydrofracking, GMO’s, Animal testing are some of the topics that our students are wrestling with in class and as global citizens. 

Amanda Elefante of AWeber Shares Inspire Tech with Faculty

Lower School STEAM Project in the Maker Space

Students in Lauren Vanin's fifth grade class had Halloween fun in the maker space this week with a STEAM project making Pumpkin Catapults.  "This STEAM design challenge was created to give give students an opportunity to plan, design, test, and improve catapults using specific consumable materials." reports Vanin. Her students had this to say, "I know know what a 'maker mindset' is…….”

“We knew we had to design a structure that would shoot the pumpkin the furthest, so it took lots of experimenting to find the correct spoon height.” “Most of the time we spent improving our original design…..we want back to the drawing board a lot!” “It was fun measuring the distance of our shots”

“Next time I’m using the materials differently!” “The group whose catapult shot the furthest spent less time building and more time planning.  I’m doing that next time”

8th Grade Science Faculty Workshop New Curriculum in the BCI

US Student Entrepreneurs Hear from Root Stock Racing's Abby Perkiss

Abby Perkiss, History Professor at Kean University and co-founder of Root Stock Racing, an adventure race planning and community building not for profit located in the Philadelphia region met with students from the Entrepreneurship class to speak about the company, and her journey from passion to profit, and the power of building the right brand. Along with her husband,  GA upper school history teacher Brent Freedland,  Root Stock will begin to roll out their races in 2016.

Lower School / Upper School Tower Design Challenge

On September 25th the lower school and upper school collaborated on a design thinking project where they were instructed to imagine your team is proposing a GA Tower to be constructed on campus. Think Eiffel Tower, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Tower of London, Watts Tower in LA…
Envision the Tower as a celebration of Germantown Academy for all time.