Category Archives: Accomplishments

LigerBots Host FIRST LEGO League Eastern Mass. Championship

Accomplishments, Events

Many thanks to the LigerBots, Newton’s high-school robotics team, for again hosting the FIRST Lego League (FLL) Massachusetts Eastern Championship yesterday. This year’s event featured the 24 FLL teams in Grades 4-8 that qualified for the event from across eastern Massachusetts, including three teams from Newton: The Selfless Shellfish, Lazer Robotics, and Fuego LEGO. Teams competed in robot matches and in their presentations of both their robot designs and their research-based innovation design projects.  All activities were based on this year’s transportation-focused FLL theme, Cargo Connect (see video and overview).

At yesterday’s championship, Lazer Robotics received the award for achieving the highest score in the robot matches.

Team Fuego LEGO — all 7th graders at Oak Hill MS — have been together for three years, having started at Bowen Elementary. They have been working on their robot since this summer and qualified for this event by winning the Core Values Award at an FLL competition in Springfield earlier this month, which was featured in the local TV news.

The Selfless Shellfish — also 7th graders at Oak Hill MS — started at Zervas Elementary. They did very well yesterday, coming close to high score in the robot matches and working more smoothly than their “nail-biter” performance at the recent qualifying competition in Easton. They programmed their robot in Python, a more challenging language than Scratch, and together they built a library of code for robot maneuvers that all team members could share.

And mentor Greer Tan Swiston won the Outstanding Volunteer award.

Due to Covid, this year’s championship was not open to the public, and the Ligerbots were not able to host the wonderful STEM fair that has accompanied the event in earlier years.

NSHS Math Team is Busy!

Accomplishments

Last week, the Newton South HS Math Team participated in its first meet, a pre-season scrimmage in the Greater Boston Mathematics League. The team’s future schedule includes the Duke Math Meet on November 6, the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament on November 13, American Mathematics Competitions (AMC) on November 10 and 16, and GBML meets on November 10 – 11, December  8 -9, January 12 – 13, and February 9 – 10.  In addition, a group of NSHS students is running a Math Club at Oak Hill MS with weekly practices to prepare for MathCounts and other math tournaments.

6th Annual Bowen Science Day: 1st Time Online — A Big Success

Accomplishments, Events, Virtual/Online

Bowen Science Day 2021Today the Bowen Elementary School PTO held its 6th annual Science Day — held virtually on Zoom this year for the first time — and the collaboration among so many people was a big success in empowering students and making science accessible.

  • The stars of the show:  About 100 Bowen students presented 74 projects in 2-minute videos on FlipGrid before the event for the entire school community.
  • The students also presented their results in live discussions with seven visiting scientists from the Journal of Emerging Investigators during several sets of half-hour sharing sessions in Zoom breakout rooms.
  • Middle-school students from the Oak Hill Garden Club served as monitors for the breakout rooms.
  • High-school students from the NNHS STEMentors club, formed to inspire elementary students in STEM, led parallel sessions with science games, experiments, and hands-on engineering projects.
  • The Newton Ligerbots robotics team provided expertise in Zoom management.
  • Principal Guzzi viewed each student’s FlipGrid presentation before the event and spoke in a brief keynote highlighting the students’ curiosity, engagement, and sharing.
  • Bowen parents Diane Gomez, Melanie Hildebrandt, Larissa Gordon, and Betty Wang organized and managed the entire event and curated a helpful list of online resources.

The organizers encourage other Newton PTOs to host Science Days, and their advice:  “Start small, keep the rules loose, and don’t formally judge it. Encourage kids to be excited and curious about science and feel empowered to share that curiosity with their community. We are so proud of every single one of these students. It takes so much courage to share your work!” For more information or advice, contact scienceday@bowenpto.org.

Science Club for Girls: Catalyst Awards Video Solicits Your Support

Accomplishments, Opportunities

Science Club for Girls celebrated its annual Catalyst Awards online recently. You can view their video presentation, which gives a great overview of how SCFG excels at fostering excitement, confidence, and literacy in STEM for girls and young women from underrepresented communities. SCFG offers free, experiential activities in STEM for K-8 girls; junior mentoring and leadership experiences for high school girls; and adult mentoring and role modeling by committed women with STEM careers. You can support SCFG through donations and volunteering.

Newton Schools Foundation Makes STEM Grants

Accomplishments

The Newton Schools Foundation announced 20 grants this year, including these STEM-related ones:

  • The Calculus Project: A comprehensive program to increase the number of African American, Hispanic, and low-income students who enroll in and successfully complete calculus in high school.
  • STEM for Students with Visual Impairment:  Materials to ensure the NPS STEM curriculum can be adapted for the students during the 2020-2021 school year.

Science Club for Girls: Success By the Numbers

Accomplishments, Opportunities

Science Club for Girls is celebrating its 25h anniversary providing free, experiential activities in STEM for K-8 girls — prioritizing those who are underrepresented in STEM by race and socioeconomic factors. SCFG also offers junior mentoring and leadership experiences for high school girls, supported by adult mentoring and role modeling by women with STEM careers. SCFG’s success is shown in these numbers:

  • Over 250 girls in Grades K-12 engaged this fall in hands-on learning in SCFG’s 8-week Virtual Science Clubs, “Engineering Around the World’;
  • 75% of participating girls coming from SCFG’s priority communities;
  • 73 mentors, many of whom are women in STEM;
  • Over 40 volunteers packing and distributing science kits for each girl to have her own supplies for hands-on experiments; and
  • Nearly 25 episodes of  the #SCFGLive! science show, with more than 21,688 views, reaching an even wider audience of girls.

You can be a part of this by supporting SCFG through donations and volunteering.

LigerBots Teach from Experience: Making Distance Learning Work

Accomplishments, Great ideas, Resources

Newton’s high-school robotics team, the LigerBots, have done an amazing job in creating and implementing their free, online mentoring programs for elementary students during pandemic quarantines:  the Awesome Mentorship Program during the school year and Camp AMP during the summer. Now students on the team are sharing the expertise they have gained in a white paper, Distance Education Using Zoom, focusing on:

  • Adapting to a virtual learning environment
  • Providing education and entertainment for students
  • Building an engaged online community

The white paper will show you how, according to the Boston Globe, this team has “cracked the code for making virtual learning fun.” Congratulations and thanks, LigerBots!