Eighth Graders Build Engineering Skills and Prepare for Solar Car Race
Eighth grade students at Mount Madonna School are developing engineering skills in preparation for building their own solar cars to race at the 6th annual Summit for the Planet Walk-a-thon and Celebration on April 28.
The class began a three-week engineering unit involving experiments and activities designed to give them an intrinsic understanding of engineering basics, electricity, solar panel placement, circuitry, fluid dynamics, gear ratios, Newtonian mechanics, and experimental design.
In his third season as the volunteer coach for Mount Madonna School’s (MMS) middle school soccer program, parent Carson Kelly (Zoe, 9th, Indigo, 6th, and Cecily, 1st) remains committed to inspiring his young players to stay focused, play hard, and have fun!
Quiz question:
For nonprofit organizations, determining how to creatively and successfully meet annual fundraising goals can be difficult and time-consuming – and frequently not a lot of fun. With the dual intent of putting the “fun” back in “fundraising” and bringing together other local nonprofit organizations – including, educational, environmental, and youth-focused groups – Mount Madonna School (MMS) is again hosting its annual community walk-a-thon and celebration –a family event intended to make fundraising as easy as a walk in the park!
Sitting near containers filled with assorted plastic K’Nex and Lego Mindstorm pieces, two seventh grade girls laugh as they put the finishing touches on their robot creation, and joke about what to name it. Nearby, other students concentrate on working with the program software and syncing it to correctly control their robot.
Standing in front of the class, the sandy-haired boy shuffles his feet, avoiding eye contact with the middle school students seated before him. He looks up, shyly meets his classmates’ gaze, and takes a deep breath. Exhaling, he begins telling a story in Spanish. The words come haltingly at first, then, as his confidence improves, he relaxes and expands his vocabulary, exploring different sentence structures and verb conjugations.
“Okay, let’s be honest. We’re in middle school, so we’re not adults and we’re not little kids either. By term, we’re somewhere in between. That can be annoying.”