The KGA fifth graders received some exciting news from the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University that the 2012-2013 Knox Gifted Academy group of fifth graders were chosen to participate in the Flame Challenge Finalists World Wide Assembly on April 30, 2013. We were one of ten schools chosen from an international pool of thousands. It is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our students!
The Flame Challenge is designed to have scientists from around the world answer a question for a target audience of 11-year-olds. This year’s question was: What is Time? Our KGA fifth graders were part of a large pool of student evaluators that worked to review and evaluate a set of written, graphic, and video entries that attempted to answer this question. These are the six finalists. We will be a part of the assembly with moderator and host, Alan Alda on Tuesday, April 30 via media technology we have available. Hundreds of schools around the world will be watching the assembly. Ten will be participating.
2013 Earth Day
To celebrate Earth Day, KGA fifth graders are creating an iBook, featuring images taken that show their perspective of our Earth, and the words those images inspired. Enjoy a preview of their images.
2013 CATalyst for Change
If you've ever attended a CUSD CATS students Catalyst for Change event before this year, you noticed that there were significant changes in the format. The biggest change was the focus on presentation skills. We had eight teams of students, like the one below, represent KGA fifth grade at this year's event this past Saturday, April 20th at Basha High School. If you attended the event and heard some of their talks, you'll agree that they did indeed move us to tears, move us to laughter, or moved us to act. In addition to the talks, families that attended enjoyed dissecting invertebrates, standing inside a giant bubble, constructing an oboe reed from a straw, building and flying a perpetual glider, extracting DNA, eating liquid nitrogen-frozen ice cream, and much more!
Design Squad Simple Machines
Teams of engineers have designed, built, tested, and refined a series of three simple machines. Now it's time for them to share their creations with the world. One set of teams created a confetti launcher. The goal was to make the machine easy to use and send a cloud of confetti high into the air. A second set of teams designed an extreme kicking machine that not only launched a ping pong ball into a cup one foot away, nut also returned the balls to the launch site. Finally, a third set of teams designed a machine that could pick up a variety of household objects and deposit them into a bucket two feet away.
