Sara King was six years old when she started working in the fields. Born to migrant workers in Mexico that resettled in west Texas every summer – the pattern played out until she was 18. “It wasn’t easy,” recalls the now American citizen. “I would miss school. We would be out from May to September. […]
It’s mid-afternoon at Walbridge Elementary School and the hallways are buzzing. Literally. Electronic buzzer sounds spill out of classrooms as students work on circuitry projects. Jaime Gilligan, with Washington University’s Institute for School Partnership (ISP), is touring the school with principal Mildred Moore. Walbridge is one of several schools in the St. Louis Public School […]
“This is stressful,” Emilia Talarski says in between bites of pizza. She’s worried her balsa wood glider will break. Although, it already has a crack. It happened when she fell while holding it. But she describes it as a happy accident. “It actually made the glider fly better,” says the third grader from MOSAIC Elementary […]
I see red! I see green! I see purple! Sporting virtual reality headsets, a group of seventh-graders from Hawthorn Leadership School for Girls, are sharing the different colors they see as they take a virtual tour of brain cells. “I haven’t experienced anything like this before,” Cailyn McGraw says. “Seeing the cells and the cells […]
Nowadays Sally Elgin would probably be referred to as gifted or talented. But in the 1950s, a really smart girl was obnoxious or a nerd. “I come from a long line of nerds and it’s not always a good social position to be in,” explains Elgin, the Viktor Hamburger Professor of Arts & Sciences at […]
(February 21, 2018 by Molly Davis) On a Saturday afternoon, local elementary school students and their families filed into a classroom for the “Getting Started with Science Fair” workshop, ready to spend the next few hours preparing to apply the scientific method to a question that interested the students. The group listened intently to the opening […]
“I made it move,” an ecstatic Jalen Royston said as he bolted up from his seat, pumping his fists in the air. He’d inputted the correct code to make clouds on his computer screen move to the left. Sporting a “Hello, I’m Awesome” T-shirt, Jalen, a fifth-grader at Barbara C. Jordan Elementary School in The […]
More than 100 years before the invention of the modern computer, the idea of computer programming existed. Created by a gifted mathematician named Ada Lovelace who wrote instructions for the first computer program in the mid-1800s. “The takeaway from her work is that computational thinking is not device-dependent,” said Jaime Gilligan, instructional specialist with the […]
Twelve years after its launch, the innovative mySci curriculum program developed by Washington University’s Institute for School Partnership (ISP) and local teacher leaders is seeing incredible growth, doubling in size two years in a row. This school year, St. Louis Public Schools will introduce mySci in all of its 45 elementary schools. The district joins 150 […]
Michelle Harrison was scared. She has a fear of touching dead things. And now she was tasked with dissecting a pig heart. But instead of dodging the assignment, Harrison faced her fear, grabbed the scalpel and went to work. “It was eye-opening and I’m so glad I did it,” said Harrison, a sixth-grade teacher at […]