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 (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) at East High School, May 15‒19, featured faculty from UW-Madison and professionals representing corporate and public sector careers who discussed everything from arts to finance to fish — math and science are everywhere.
Our guests included State Representative Melissa Sargent; North District MPD Officers David Dexheimer and Alex Nieves-Reyes; urban planner Revel Sims; engineers Randolph Ashton, Dante Fratte and Xudong Wang; mathematicians Daniel Erman and Jordan Ellenberg; architect Shannon Lorry; linguist Monica Macaulay; entrepreneur Gregory St. Fort; videographer Michael Alston and many others.
We also honored East students Josselin Ceballos de Santiago and Omar Wilson, the 2017 Trevor G. Knight Rising Stars in Mathematics. We congratulate them on being recognized for their positive approach to learning mathematics.
The 18th Annual Pi-Mile Run/Walk brought fans of fitness, mathematics and pastry together May 27 at Warner Park. This event is the primary support for the East High School Graphing Calculator Fund — and there’s pie. Thank you to our local grocers for supplying both ingredients and whole pies.
East Engineering Club members Julian Kern-Steffen, Quinn Koenig and Sam Redemann conducted a double session of Family Science Night at Emerson Elementary School April 25. Our young future engineers brainstormed ideas for making driverless cars safe and efficient. They acted out the role of a robot using sensors to follow a path through a color-coded grid of streets and helped a real robot follow a route consisting of student-drawn paths. Thank you to parents and guardians who brought students to this event and similar ones at all our area elementary schools. At press time, our students were looking forward to one more Family Science Night at Gompers Elementary School May 23.
The UW-Madison College of Engineering Diversity Affairs Office helped organize two events for us in April. Eighteen East students were able to experiment with circuits, sensors and programming during an April 22 workshop. They also had time for Q&A with a guest panel of engineering students whose members included our very own 2015 alum, Brandon Alvarez-Carerra. On April 28 another 20 East students attended LEEP Day 2017 (Latin@s Exploring Engineering Professions), a day of activities, lab tours and interactive sessions with students and faculty on the Madison engineering campus. Thank you to everyone who contributed pennies and bought gummy bears to help cover transportation costs for our field trips.