Three Newton students won awards at the Massachusetts State Science and Engineering Fair at MIT yesterday.  Newton Country Day School junior Katelyn McGauley won a Third Place award, and Newton Country Day School senior Emma Hartman and Newton South High School junior Matthew Cole won Honorable Mention awards. All awards are listed here. Photos and info from Newton Country Day School News:

McGauley’s project, “The Parallel Between Rising Shark and Seal Populations off the Coast of Cape Cod,” reviewed and analyzed published literature to identify causes of the increasing shark populations.

Hartman’s project, “Identifying EEG Correlates to Intentional Motor Movement,” used a homemade electroencephalography machine to analyze how human brains process tasks.

The Newton Ligerbots previously qualified for, and competed this weekend at, the FIRST Newton England District Championships at WPI, ranking 34th of 64 teams at the event.  The LigerBots finished the season with an offensive power ranking of 29 out of over 200 teams in New England.

Samantha Rosenberg, the team’s chief technical officer and a junior at Newton South High School, won a Dean’s List Finalist Award, given to student leaders who have led their teams and communities to increased awareness for the FIRST Robotics program and its mission to inspire students to pursue studies in science, technology, engineering and math, all while achieving technical expertise and accomplishment. She will compete for the Dean’s List Award at the FIRST World Championship in Detroit during the weekend of April 24-27.

Dr. Noa Rensing of West Newton, one of the team’s co-head coaches, won the Woodie Flowers Semi-finalist Award at the Central Massachusetts District Event. Mentors are nominated by students and the award is given to a mentor who has given them the best understanding of the challenges, opportunities, and satisfaction involved in the discipline of engineering and design.

Congratulations to the Science Teams of Newton North HS (in photo) and Newton South HS for placing 2nd and 4th respectively among 55 high school teams in the preliminary results of this year’s Massachusetts Science Olympiad held at Framingham State University. These are preliminary results, to be finalized in the next two weeks. Each team assigns one or two students to compete in each of 25 events throughout the all-day competition. Newton North won first place in five events and second place in four:

• Gus Betts-O’Rourke, Alina Zheng, Skyler Bohnert – first, Codebusters
• Laura Schmidt-Hong and Julian Liao – first, Designer Genes
• Laura Schmidt-Hong and Emily Davis-Morin – first, Disease Detectives
• Ethan Gahm and David Genis – first, Dynamic Planet
• Laura Schmidt-Hong and Alina Zheng – first, Herpetology
• Eve Martin and Abby Lau – second, Astronomy
• Eve Martin, Jonathan Liu, and Jessica Chen – second, Experimental Design
• Ethan Gahm and Emily Davis-Morin – second, Mission Possible
• Jessica Chen, Emily Pan, and Max Tu – second, Protein Modeling

Acton-Boxborough placed first, as it has since 2009, when Newton North last came out on top.

In recent weeks the Ligerbots, Newton’s dual-high-school FIRST robotics team, has been very busy:

• During a six-week designated “build season,” the team designed and built Thanos, a brand new robot for this year’s competition, Destination: Deep Space. This entailed working six days a week as well as through the February school break.
• Five team members and a mentor participated in the two-day FIRST Southern New England Advocacy Conference (SNEAC), learning about legislative advocacy for FIRST and STEM initiatives and then practicing what they learned in meetings on Beacon Hill with Newton’s legislators and/or their staff.
• This weekend, the team participated in its first FIRST competition of the season, the Southeastern Massachusetts District Event, in Bridgewater. The team joined an alliance that made it into the semi-finals.

On March 3, Newton North HS sent three teams to the Blue Lobster Bowl, Massachusetts’ regional marine sciences quiz bowl at MIT, and Newton South HS sent one.  The full-day competition — a Regional Competition of the National Ocean Sciences Bowl — covers chemistry, biology, engineering, history, ecology, climate change, and weather.  North’s A team placed 2nd of 15 teams, its B team placed 8th, and its C team placed 9th.  South’s team placed 6th.

Oak Hill Middle School teachers Maureen Stewart and Jessie Cadigan sent this about the school’s Girls Who Code program:

The Girls Who Code group at Oak Hill has been meeting weekly since October. We are very fortunate to have a parent volunteer, Raktim Sinha, who offered to start the group and share his knowledge of coding. The intent of GWC is to explore coding while teaching the girls self-reliance and problem-solving in a collaborative and fun environment. It has a wide interest with many girls joining across all three grades. The girls started by learning basic concepts using Scratch and now have moved on to Python. Interspersed with the coding lessons, the girls are also exploring ideas around what it means to be “courageous” and “creative.” They are currently brainstorming project ideas that they will focus on for the rest of the year.

Yesterday the Newton LigerBots high-school robotics team hosted the Eastern Massachusetts FIRST Lego League (FLL) Championship featuring 48 FLL teams that qualified for the event from across eastern Massachusetts, including three Newton-based teams:  the Day Dragons, the Roaming Rovers, and the Hawks. In addition to competing in LEGO robot matches, the teams presented their projects on this year’s outer-space theme, Into Orbit. The Day Dragons won the Inspiration Award and the Roaming Rovers won the Teamwork Award. This was a great showing for Newton team in a very competitive event. The event also featured 10 FLL Jr. teams presenting their projects on this year’s FLL Jr. outer-space based theme, Mission Moon.

Accompanying the tournament was a maker fair featuring hands-on activities from the Brandeis Maker Lab, Students for a Greener World, Newton Free Library, Empow Studios, Hatch, Johnson String Instruments, Kevin Osborn, the Massachusetts National Guard, and Code Ninjas, as well as LigerBots STEAM activities: 3D printing, button making, paper airplanes, origami, slime, brush bots, PB&J Robot, and binary beads. About 70 Newton Girl Scouts attended the maker fair, which served as their 2018 STEAM Workshop. The Girl Scouts earned their STEAM patch by participating in activities sponsored by the Ligerbots and other exhibitors. See more photos here.