By Cynthia Chin
East High School

Thanks to our Northside and larger Madison community for making some happy spring memories with East students and staff.

STEAM Week at East High, May 21-25, featured guests from the UW-Madison mathematics and engineering departments, along with professionals representing corporate and public sector careers. Included among our guests were MPD Officer David Dexheimer discussing his artwork on display at Overture; video game designers Kathleen Stull and Michael Beall; meteorologists; mathematicians Jean-Luc Thiffeault, Flynn Dustrud and William Cocke; and engineers Melanie Rogers and Tabitha Davis. Other guests discussed antibiotics, bats, computer security, fractal-inspired dance, science playwriting and more. We also honored Angel Montes and Ben Schneider, the 2018 Trevor G. Knight Rising Stars in Mathematics.

The 19th annual Pi-Mile Run/Walk brought fans of fitness, pastry and mathematics together at Warner Park May 26. This event is the primary support for the East High School Graphing Calculator Fund — and there is pie. Thank you to our Math Club for organizing it and to local grocers for supplying both ingredients and whole pies.

Women in STEM is sponsoring a Family STEM Afterschool event May 31, 4:30‒6:30 pm, at East High School. Bring the whole family. Focus will be on interactive tasks appropriate for elementary students.

The UW-Madison College of Engineering Chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers hosted 27 East students for LEEP Day 2018 (Latin@s Exploring Engineering Professions), a day of activities, lab tours and interactive sessions with UW students and faculty.

Congratulations to our 2018 Math Modeling Team: Ariel Haber-Fawcett, Jude Langhammer, Marlin Lee, Tenzin Namgyal and Khailanii Slaton. They made it into the top 20 percent of over 900 papers submitted nationally for the Mathworks Math Modeling Challenge with a three-part solution paper on the related problems of food waste and food insecurity.

East High School has been selected as Madison’s pilot school for the Teen Science Café (TSC) program. This is a STEM learning, career exploration, leadership development and public science outreach model that originated in New Mexico. Teens are put charge of planning monthly public outreach sessions for their peers, families and the larger community. In the process, they develop leadership skills and form partnerships with mentor scientists. An outreach liaison expert helps the students clarify and execute their plans. TSC’s first event was held May 1 and featured environmental scientists Diana Guzman Colon and Gayatri Deshpande. All TSC events are open to the public.

The outreach coordinator from the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery is Jerrod Buckner (EHS Class of 2009). East students interested in joining this group should contact Mr. Buckner at Jbuckner@morgridge.org or 316-4675. There is still room for lots of members, and activities will continue through the summer.