The upper school brought Spirit Week to a rousing finish on Friday with the much-anticipated spirit rally held at Davis Field. As always, the hilariously entertaining skits from each upper school class were the primary draw.
Following a performance by the junior varsity dance squad (who performed a dazzling routine to the themes from “Pokemon” and “Kim Possible”), grade 9 students took the field with their spin on “Winnie the Pooh,” featuring a dance number that paid tribute to a number of Michael Jackson hits.
All four classes then participated in a game of “Human Etch-A-Sketch,” in which groups of students created scenes such as a school bus, tea party and merry-go-round. The seniors, having the most experience in spirit events, won the game.
Grade 10 then took the field for their own skit, which was nonetheless entertaining despite some unfortunate technical difficulties.
For their skit, several grade 11 students dressed up as the cast of Scooby Doo, who piled into their “Mystery Machine” van to solve another case. The Harker cheerleaders followed, performing an energetic and complex series of moves, ending with a human pyramid.
This year’s relay event had students running while using hula hoops and trying to snag donuts with their hands behind their backs. Not surprisingly, the relay ended with each one of the class deans receiving a pie to the face.
The seniors took the field for the final skit of the rally, in which they played characters from “The Magic School Bus,” with Andrew Irvine, chemistry teacher, playing the part of Ms. Frizzle and taking the students on a journey to observe Harker’s amazing senior class.
The rally ended with the student-favorite scream-off, which was won by the juniors. As a joke, the class of 2011 decided to merely pantomime the act of screaming while staying completely silent. After the upper school classes had their turns, the Eagle Buddies gave a spirited scream of their own to bring the rally to a close.
Aneesh Chopra, U.S. chief technology officer, has written an extensive blog about his visit with Daniela Lapidous and Shreya Indukuri, both grade 11. Read the blog here. Read our story on their visit, too!
Innovation took top billing at Nichols Hall on Sat., April 23, as the doors opened to the sixth annual Harker Research Symposium featuring the yearlong scientific endeavors of 79 middle and upper school students. Themed “A Call to Innovation,” the day merged students and their families with leading technology companies and executives, in the sort of synergy that created Silicon Valley. Anita Chetty, science department chair and symposium director, estimated there were about 500 visitors, up 50 percent over last year.
Chetty recalled how relatively slow and limited the communication of information was in the “dark ages” of card catalogs – when a laptop was not yet even a dream. Today, Chetty noted, “When our students begin their research, they stand on a mountain of readily accessible information, not only mining it but also building upon it.”
Collaboration between students, universities and businesses was evident in breakout sessions on the summer internship work of upper school students such as Michelle Deng, grade 11, who worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on a faster method to calculate the metallicities of stars, as an indicator of origin. “I’ve always been partial to science,” said Deng. “Some of it is the culture at Harker. It is a pretty big leader in science.” Topics at the sessions ranged from the use of algorithms to predict protein structure, to an anaerobic method of hydrogen generation.
Harker welcomed back Jessie Li ’07, Nikhil Deshmukh ’04 and Jennifer Ong ’07, who demonstrated how research impacts the world. Li spoke about her work at MIT to develop a video annotation tool that has applications in face detection and robotic navigation. Deshmukh presented his work at Princeton University in retinal image processing and ultimately a better understanding of the brain. Ong encouraged students to publish their research in the international, student-led forum, “The Triple Helix.”
The relationship of innovative research to application was epitomized by keynote speakers Scott McNealy, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of the board of Sun Microsystems, and Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook. Both men spoke of the importance of creative thinking and risk-taking in developing an idea into a company. Sponsored by WiSTEM, Kari Lee, senior engineering manager at Facebook, talked about how to position oneself to take advantage of opportunities.
Corporate exhibitors at this event were Barnes & Noble (Nook), eBay, Ericcson, Google/YouTube, InSync software, Inc., Kno, Inc., Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, Menteon Learning, Meru Networks, Motorola Mobility, nVIDIA and Symmetricom. Watch for the a complete roundup of symposium events and speakers in the Summer Harker Quarterly mailing in June 2011.
In Chris Spenner’s Research Methods Class, upper school students are learning about research methods by researching, planning and conducting their own studies. Spenner’s emphasis in the class has been the teaching of “proper scientific practices” that have included the study of experimental design and statistics.
The projects that the students are currently working on range from human subject studies, such as the effects of caffeine on short term memory, to the hot topic of alternative energy, with a study being conducted on solar panel efficiency. These studies are currently ongoing and represent the culmination of a semester’s worth of effort; about 80 percent of class time is devoted to it. The students have to collect the data for their studies, analyze their results and compose a formal report.
For more information on the research methods course, contact Chris Spenner at ChrisS@harker.org and for more information about Harker students’ research, search “research” at news.harker.org.
[Updated] In mid-April Harker’s Key Club took a trip to Anaheim to attend the annual Key Club district convention. More than 3,000 students attended from all over California, Hawaii and Nevada. The group, chaperoned by Kerry Enzensperger, activities director, and Kevin Williamson, upper school dean of students, also spent a day at Disneyland.
“Our focus for our visit to the convention was primarily to become exposed to the diverse world that Key Club is a part of,” said Farrah Gulzar, grade 11, vice president of Key Club. “Not only were we able to meet new people, but we were informed of fundraising ideas, amazing organizations and various projects that we may be able to integrate into our own club for the 2011-2012 term.
“I was really intrigued by the project that Kiwanis and UNICEF are working on, “Project Eliminate.” This project focuses on helping children with the disease MNT, and the information they gave us and the videos we were presented created a new awareness in many of us. I’m hoping that in next year’s term we can focus our efforts on this project,” Gulzar said.
“At DCON, there are group sessions, where all 3000 of us are gathered into a giant room where we are updated on the progress of our entire district,” said Jennifer Nguyen, grade 12, president of the club, “covering things like new membership, the total community service hours we all have donated, the amount of money we raised and so forth.”
“Then, there are also seminars which are typically smaller, about 50-60 people per seminar,” Nguyen continued. “You get to choose which seminar you would like to attend and they range anywhere from “How to be a Successful Leader” to “Key Club 101,” thus, every Key Clubber can personalize his or her agenda to suit what they have in mind for their involvement in Key Club.
“Because our club arrived to convention early, we were able to spend a day at Disneyland. The weather was perfect and we were all able to have lunch together,” said Nguyen. “It was amazing! We were also able to squeeze in about an hour poolside where Mr. Williamson treated us all to refreshments and we were able to talk freely with him about the community service policies at Harker. It was very interesting to be able to talk as a group and communicate our thoughts and ideas directly to the administration.”
The Saratoga campus received a special Earth Day gift – a London Plains tree from the Modern Woodmen of America. Representatives of the group presented the tree because part of the group’s charter is to give back to the community. With the help of the Eagle Buddies (sophomore students and their grade 3 buddies) the tree was planted along the border of Rosenthal Field on the Saratoga campus.
Founded in 1883, Modern Woodmen of America is a fraternal society that provides financial services and other benefits to its members, which number more than 750,000 nationwide.
Harker’s award-winning artist, Vladimir Sepetov, grade 12, will have his work on display for sale at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art’s Print Fair, an open portfolio sale by more than 35 Bay Area printmakers, this weekend. He will be displaying on Saturday only, April 30 from 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. and admission is free. The institute is at 560 South First Street, San Jose.
The Harker robotics team competed at San Jose State University in April, the second competition of the robotics season and their last chance to qualify for the national competition. This drive team competed at UC Davis in early March and finished the preliminary rounds in the top 10 teams, but a malfunction in one of their alliance member’s robots meant that Harker and its partner robots were literally blocked from scoring.
At the San Jose event, the team went in with high hopes and a “113.5 pound, lean, mean, extremely tough machine,” said Peter Gao, grade 12, executive president of the team, which is run as an enterprise. Although the team did not advance to the national level, the experience of building and running the robot was the real value in the effort.
The robot was constructed entirely by students, with guidance from Eric Nelson, physics and astronomy teacher. This year, they built a simple and reliable robot to make it easily repairable and maintainable between matches. This simpler design, pioneered by team members Pranav Bheda, grade 10 and Jason Yu, grade 11, brought durability to the robot, as well as decreased construction time. Instead of having to finish building the robot very near to the competition date, the robotics team finished the robot with two weeks to spare, giving them a chance to develop a well-practiced drive team, well-prepared for competition.
After the San Jose event, Gao analyzed what went wrong. “On one hand, our driver was kind of rusty because the last competition was a few weeks before, and we didn’t give him sufficient practice time,” he said. “Also, there were strange programming/electronics errors that simply shut down our robot at the beginning of the round, and we’re still not sure what’s causing them.”
Still, the team had a fair to middling shot at glory. “I think we did a lot better than previous years, though not as well as I would have liked,” said Gao. “We managed to build a functioning and capable robot a week early, and got enough practice and testing time to iron out a lot of kinks. The gains from this year are not technical, but organizational and strategic: a simpler robot whose construction is heavily planned with periodic deadlines will be completed earlier and tested more thoroughly, leading to an overall more effective robot than a more complex one that is finished right on time.”
There is always next year and Gao has a few words of advice for next year’s team: remember that simplicity and reliability are most important with a robot. Without them, the robot is ineffective. Also, a human is many times more reliable than a machine.
With spirit week in full swing and the weather clearing up nicely, Wednesday’s long lunch was enjoyed on Davis Field while spectators viewed the annual powder puff football game. Two all-female teams, one made up of grades 9 and 12, the other made up of grades 10 and 11, faced off in a game of flag football, with the sophomores and juniors utilizing a combination of passing and rushing to secure a 12-0 victory.
Sports attire was worn all over the upper school in keeping with the day’s theme. On Monday, students, faculty and staff could be seen wearing pajamas and slippers and participating in a sleeping bag race for “PJ Day,” and Tuesday featured all manner of brightly colored and obnoxiously patterned clothing for the theme of “Would You Be My Friend if I Wore This Every Day?” which featured a lunchtime balloon stomp. Cowboy hats, boots, flannel shirts, oversized belt buckles and scarves were the style du jour for Thursday’s “Wild West Day,” with students taking to the water at the Singh Aquatic Center for the duct tape regatta. On Friday, students will dress in their class colors and participate in the much-anticipated spirit rally.
In February, Harker was host for this year’s Council for Spiritual and Ethical Education conference, which had 60 participants from schools from all over the country, including Dallas, Miami and New York. One school even made the trip from Colombia to attend the conference.
The conference was held so that schools from different areas could discuss the topic of academic integrity and share what measures they have taken to preserve it. “It’s really great for a small group of kids who’re on an honor council to see that other kids at different schools are having the same issues,” said Kevin Williamson, dean of students at the upper school. “So it’s a great way to talk about how they resolve these somewhat sticky situations.” The conference also featured a special presentation by Stanford University’s Judicial Council.
Harker Honor Council members helped organize the event, led discussion groups and also showed the visitors around the campus. The guests were impressed with Harker’s facilities and food services, and the event was such a success that the Honor Council is discussing the possibility of creating its own academic integrity conference for next year.