Issue link: http://latinschool.uberflip.com/i/1022678
Global Partnerships Latin has established partnerships with schools across the globe and offers upper school students these opportunities for learning exchanges: » Berlin, Germany: cultural/historical exchange with Georg Herwegh Gymnasium » Paris, France: language immersion/cultural exchange with École Alsacienne » Sindelfingen, Germany: performing arts exchange with Goldberg Gymnasium » Cape Town, South Africa: cultural exchange with Cedar House » Taizhou, China: language immersion/cultural exchange with Taizhou No.1 High School » Kigali, Rwanda: partnership with international medical NGO WE-ACTx and the Rwandan NGO WE-ACTx for Hope » Mussoorie, India: partnership with Woodstock International School The Incredible Egg The egg drop has been a tradition at the lower school for more than 20 years. It is an engineering and design challenge that engages fourth-grade students in approaching a problem, considering multiple solutions, testing ideas and materials, and considering ideas for redesign. During science class, students work in teams to design a container that will protect an uncooked egg from breaking when dropped from a height of two stories in the middle school stairwell. Watching them put their heads together to come up with a design, share ideas and celebrate successes is what learning is all about. The students then design their outdoor egg-drop containers at home. There is a size constraint, and no battery-powered devices are allowed, but other than that, the students have many, many options for their designs. In May, the students visited Lower School Director Julie Brooks' office, climbed out the window onto the balcony, and dropped their containers to the cobblestone patio below the lower school annex. Although not all the eggs survived, there were smiles, cheers, and words of congratulations for the students whose eggs were intact after the drop. Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto After learning how the skeletal and muscular systems work together to create movement in the human body, seventh-grade students were given the challenge of creating a robotic version of a human hand. Using any materials that their group requested, they had three weeks to design, prototype, redesign and test out their hands before a panel of guest judges. They were visited by prosthetists and an orthopedic surgeon and video chatted with a biomedical engineer to get feedback and advice. Students reflected on the design process, valuable lessons they learned and the teamwork skills that were necessary in order to meet this challenge. A huge variety of hands were created as a result, ranging from simple cardboard replicas complete with stick-on fingernails to mechanical hands with servos and Arduino microprocessors. Experience Latin | 5