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.

US Students Engineer A Foldscope Telescope

Senior marine biology classes were chosen to beta test a new and exciting origami microscope developed by a Bioengineer at Stanford University.  The Foldscope as it is called conceived by scientists at The Prakash Lab at Stanford University, focuses on democratizing science by developing scientific tools that can scale up to match problems in global health and science education. Part of a growing trend to encourage citizen scientists, meant to democratize the field of work and inspire the next generation to have greater interest in science. You can read more by clicking here.

Shakespeare with a Twist: Using Thinglink in MS English

 Middle School students are preparing for their Romeo and Juliet monologues using an online caricature development site called Thinglink that allows students to create and share interactive images and videos. Peter Jennings reports "Essentially, I was looking for a way to help our students prep for their Romeo and Juliet monologues, which each student will perform for their class (some will perform for the entire middle school). The iPad apps helped them to take on the role of the character, to climb inside their character's head, and to do some research on previous performances.

Jennings continues, " Each student created a caricature of the character performing their monologue using the "Caricatura" app. This became the background for a "ThingLink," an interactive image with text and videos. Using the "ThingLink" app, students wrote a description, a letter, a journal entry, and "tweets" from their character to bolster their understanding of the character in general. To help them prepare the specific performance, they created a modern-day "translation" of their monologue, linked to a video of a professional performance of the scene, and created a video of themselves performing the monologue. All of this content is linked directly on the image of the character that they created. "