We are so excited to share some great things our students and teachers have accomplished in the past couple of weeks! Let’s start with OABA receiving their official Lighthouse Recertification through FranklinCovey’s Leader in Me program!! Way to go! In addition, here are two awesome programs that OA students participated in and were among the winners!
The NASA TechRise Student Challenge invites teams of 6th to 12th grade students to design, build, and launch experiments on suborbital rockets and balloon flights during the upcoming 2021/2022 school year. Participants will submit ideas for climate or remote-sensing experiments to fly on a high-altitude balloon, or space exploration experiments to fly aboard a suborbital rocket.
Congratulations to Aymette Medina! She and her students submitted proposals for the NASA TechRise Challenge. Out of 600 submissions from across the nation, 57 winners were announced Friday, January 21st, and one of our proposals won! Our team of students will design an experiment to test on a high-altitude balloon. We can watch our experiment live when it launches! We are so proud of our students and Ms. Medina!
Future City is a project-based learning program where students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades imagine, research, design, and build cities of the future.
7th and 8th grade OABA students competed in 4 teams with other Houston area schools. They needed to research and plan a future city that focused on this year's theme: Waste-Free. In early October, 6th-8th grade students visited the Green Resource Building, Environmental Systems and Sheldon Lake Park to learn about a circular economy, what systems are in place already in our city and how to develop a waste-free city. For the past several months, students researched, developed an essay, created a model and a presentation. On Saturday, January 22nd, students from each team participated in a Question and Answer session with engineers and other expert judges over Zoom.
Two of our four teams won the following:
BEST IN USE OF SPACE: New Salvaged Australis (Anaiah Pugh, Samantha Weeks and Iliana Rosselit)
BEST RESIDENTIAL ZONE: NeoCity (Kevin Majka, Samantha Williams, Melaney Anthony, Sunny Boogaard)
Way to go, OA!!! We are so proud of everyone!
Dr. Jennifer Goodman
Superintendent