10
February 25, 2014
catholic schools
CATHOLIC EDUCATION INSPIRES
St. Christopher School hosts
Lego Robotics qualifier tournament
St. Lawrence
Elementary completes
engineering projects
Classes at St. Lawrence Elementary
and Middle School, kindergarten to fifth
grade, completed an engineering project
appropriate for their grade level, created
and guided by science teacher Michelle
Varnau.
“We wanted to try something new
this year, and the next generation of
elementary science standards includes
engineering, so we want to be ready,”
Varnau explained.
Students were challenged to create
something that would meet the standards of the problem given to their class.
In second grade, the problem was to
create a musical instrument that would
have three levels of pitch.
In fifth grade, the challenge was to
create a tool that would melt an extralarge chocolate chip over simmering
water, without it touching the water.
Students in kindergarten examined how
the shape, size and color of small con-
knowledge .
T
he Valley Catholic
St. Lawrence eighth grader Nolan Ilumin
interviews kindergarten student Ethan
Baraan about his engineering project which
explored how container shape affects water
evaporation.
tainers affected the evaporation of water.
Ooblek recipe comparisons (first
grade), controlling and directing a
beam of light in a light box (third
grade), and building a model of a shed
that could withstand earthquake tremors (fourth grade) were other engineering challenges.
Presentation students earn science honors
Presentation High School senior
Anna Thomas was recently named a
semifinalist in both the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology
and the Intel Science Talent Search.
In her project, Thomas found that
maternal infection during the first
trimester of pregnancy can induce
autistic-like neurological and behavioral
deficits, and that knocking out an immune receptor can reduce these effects.
Her research has implications for
Presentation High School students, (left)
understanding and possibly preventing
sophomore Maya Varma and (right) senior
negative consequences associated with
Anna Thomas.
maternal infection.
“I wanted to study maternal infectechnical equipment.
tion because of a study suggesting that
Thomas said she has been inspired
more than half of an individual’s autism
by her high school biology teachers. “I
risk is attributable to environmental facremember doing a lot of cool projects in
tors,” Thomas said. “As the conventional
their classes, ranging from bioinformatthought at the time was that more than
ics to behavioral science,” she said.
90 percent of autism risk is genetic, I was
“I’m grateful for their commitment to
interested in exploring the environmenspreading their passion for the subject.
tal side of the equation.”
STEM is important to me because it’s
Thomas performed most of her rehighly challenging and rewarding at
search during an internship at Stanford
the individual level but also capable of
Medical School. She said manually anamaking a significant impact for all of
lyzing tissue images was tedious and
society,” Thomas said.
challenging, so she developed a semiPresentation sophomore Maya
automated technique for doing this
Varma was one of 10 students to win a
based on supervised machine learning.
national research grant from the Johns
“Anna is passionate about performHopkins Center for Talented Youth.
ing original research projects,” said
With her proposal, “A Novel Microscience teacher Suzanne Colvin. “She
controller-Based Pulmonary Function
carries experiments with minimal suAnalyzer for Early Detection of Chronic
pervision and collects significant data
Obst