Two Harker basketball players made the Mercury News annual list. Daniza Rodriguez, grade 11, was named Third Team All-Mercury News and Vik Jain, grade 12, received All-Mercury News Honorable Mention. Both Harker teams made the playoffs this year so congrats to both teams as well as the two honorees!
Tags: In the News, SportsA new contingent of visiting students arrived from Tokyo’s Tamagawa Gakuen last month, again experiencing the rich life of Harker students firsthand.
The 25 visiting high school students were on a nationwide tour of colleges, and took time out of their hectic schedules to tour Harker’s lower and uppe rschool campuses. They observed classes, spent time at college counseling and joined the junior class on an Eagle Buddies outing.
“The college tour was the first trip of its kind made by Tamagawa. They were visiting Stanford so decided they needed to come see us as well,” said Jennifer Walrod, Harker’s director of global education.
The Tamagawa teens were warmly escorted throughout the day by volunteer Harker students, including freshmen, juniors and seniors. They arrived in the morning and split up into two groups, one going to visit college counseling, the other observing such varied classes as theater, economics, English and Japanese. Then they regrouped as a team to join Harker juniors on a visit with their Eagle Buddies at the lower school.
“This was especially fun for them to observe, especially since they got to see the kids all dressed up for St. Patrick’s Day. They enjoyed watching them play various games and asked lots of questions about what the younger students were doing,” recalled Walrod.
After enjoying an outdoor lunch there, they returned to the upper school to finish class observations and visiting college counseling. Both Tamagawa teachers and students alike voiced how impressed they were at how many Harker students and teachers spoke Japanese.
Tags: Featured Story, Global Education, topgeThis past fall the Harker InvenTeam group earned a $9,110 grant which has now led to further research and development on an aquatic thermoelectric generator. The already twice-showcased device could go on to become a common sight, floating around backyard swimming pools.
The InvenTeam is run by the Lemelson-MIT Program and awards grants to teams of inventive high school students with the goal of turning their visions into reality. The Harker team developed a solar generator that uses swimming pools, or other bodies of water, as a potential new alternative and cheaper source of green electricity. Designed to power schools, homes and businesses, the device utilizes the power of thermoelectric panels capable of harnessing the temperature difference between a hot surface and cold water. Potentially, huge floating generators might someday create enough electricity to move beyond neighborhood swimming pools and help power entire coastal regions.
The groundbreaking generator was designed by Prag Batra, grade 12, and his team: Sachin Jain and Jay Reddy, both grade 12; Ramakrishnan Menon, Wilbur Yang and Shantanu Joshi, all grade 11; and grade 10 students Nikhil Dilip and Pranav Batra.
Anthony Silk, upper school math teacher and the team’s advisor, explained that as this device floats on water, reflector panels focus sunlight onto a black surface converting the solar energy to heat. The heat is then passed through thermoelectric panels and passively dissipated into the surrounding water.
A few weeks ago, Harker and the Lemelson-MIT Program jointly sponsored a special evening presentation of the InvenTeam’s project. Held at the Nichols Hall auditorium, the event was attended by Harker families, administrators and board members. Following the InvenTeam’s presentation, special guest Joshua Schuler, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program, spoke on the importance of creating an ecosystem for young inventors in Northern California.
Most recently, the students represented one of 14 student teams participating in the Open Minds exhibition run by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco. They had received an invitation to do so from the NCIIA and Lemelson-MIT Program.
“I found the Open Minds event to be amazing. Our Harker students got to showcase their invention alongside some of the top college teams in the country,” said Silk. “They spent the evening answering tough questions from scientists, inventors and investors who all seemed extremely enthusiastic by the work done so far. It was also great preparation for EurekaFest, which will happen this summer at MIT, where the students will be presenting their project along with the other 15 high school teams from around the country,” he added, noting that a finished product should be ready by the time of the EurekaFest in June. The team is being sponsored by Lenyard Food Service for the trip to EurekaFest.
Upon receiving the initial grant award, Batra said possible applications for the generator were numerous. “For instance, the device could be used on almost any body of water and could be incorporated into future boats to provide renewable, portable power at sea,” he had said, noting that in the process, the device would help reduce reliance on nonrenewable energy sources such as fossil fuels and provide clean energy without negative environmental impacts such as air or water pollution.
Now, with the developing project generating so much early interest and excitement, it appears that Batra and his team have created a potentially marketable product!
Tags: Featured Story, ScienceThe last week of February was a big one for Harker STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students, as various upper school clubs organized special science-themed events on the upper school campus for each day of the week. On Monday, members of the school’s various STEM-related clubs handed out fun crossword puzzles with science-themed clues for their fellow students to solve. The robotics team staged an indoor cart race on Tuesday, and on Wednesday the WiSTEM fair showcased a variety of scientific phenomena, such as a bubble machine and the use of liquid nitrogen to freeze various objects.
On Thursday, the Harker chapter of the Interscholastic Gaming League displayed a range of gaming platforms from the past several decades, from Atari to the Xbox 360. Finally, on Friday, the Chemistry Club showed off some of the neat “magic tricks” that are possible with chemistry, including marble sculpting, an explosive hydrogen balloon and the famous Briggs-Rauscher color oscillation reaction, in which a variety of chemicals are combined to create a visually striking series of color changes.
Tags: Featured Story, ScienceWilliam Chang, grade 12, has won an $800 award for an essay contest. Chang was a district finalist in the Elks Most Valuable Student Contest following his performance in the recent state judging.
Reached for comment, Chang, who currently studies advanced journalism and English composition, said he found out about the competition during one of his class meetings. ” I was still in the college application mindset, so I decided to apply for the scholarship as well. I basically wrote about my general interests, extra-curriculars, and community service and leadership roles, and my reasons for pursuing them. It was very much the typical introspective college application essay. It was my first scholarship award and I was really happy to have received it,” he recalled.
The contest was sponsored by The Elk’s National Foundation, a charitable organization which awards 500 four-year scholarships to the highest-rated applicants in the competition. Applicants must advance through local, district and state competitions to reach national judging level.
Tags: topacademics, topliteratureDr. Murali Daran (Rohan, grade 8; Lea, grade 10; Roshan, grade 11) spent an afternoon in at Harker in late March demonstrating how to repair damaged heart valves. In each class, Daran removed a heart valve from a pig heart and installed a synthetic valve. He also taught students how to suture properly … a real life skill!
Tags: Featured StoryKicks Against Cancer raised nearly $12,000 in January and February for Camp Okizu, a program for families affected by childhood cancer. Money was raised by selling T-shirts and wristbands, as well as through traditional donations.
On Feb. 1, the varsity boys and girls soccer teams played their evening home games wearing the purple Kicks Against Cancer T-shirts. Both teams won their games, with the girls defeating Immaculate Conception Academy 7-0 and the boys winning over Eastside College Prep with a score of 2-1.
Profits from the food sales at Carley’s Café, which nearly ran out of supply to feed the hungry attendants, were also donated to the campaign.
“I think that this event really lets Harker have a direct impact on the lives of pediatric cancer patients and their families,” said Nicole Dalal, grade 12, who organized the event and scored a goal in the girls varsity game. “I would just say that it is incredibly rewarding to know that the game of soccer can bring together our entire community and the Okizu community as well!”
Tags: Featured Story, Outreach, Sports, topoutreachIn January, upper school art teacher Jaap Bongers took his students to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. The students admired and analyzed several of the museum’s many fascinating pieces, including its famous collection of sculptures by French artist Auguste Rodin.
Senior Xinyi “Cherry” Xie has won a National Gold Medal and a National American Visions Award from the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers for her painting, “Balcony.” Xie was profiled along with four other Harker regional winners in the spring 2012 Harker Quarterly (page 23). Xie has been invited to Carnegie Hall for the awards ceremony at the end of May and her work will be included in the scholastics exhibition in New York City at Parsons the New School of Design. Be sure to read about all five of these award-winning artists and writers in the online Harker Quarterly!
Tags: Featured Story, topfineartsTwo dozen students took the qualification exam for the International Linguistics Olympiad and five qualified for the next round. In addition, last summer, junior Erik Andersen was named a member of the United States’ team which competed in Pittsburgh, Penn. Anderson, whose interest in linguistics began in grade 8, said, “The problems in the invitational rounds are more difficult and require the participants to explain their answers using linguistic theory.” His sixth place finish automatically qualified him to continue to compete in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad events, most recently in an open round which was held last month for the first time at Harker, in Nichols Hall. The other five qualifiers are Nitya Mani, grade 9; Katie Siegel, grade 12; Rahul Sridhar, grade 10; Ramya Rangan, grade 12; and Kevin Zhu, grade 10, and all will go on to compete against the top 149 students in North America for slots on the final team.
Tags: topacademics