St. Thomas Academy
Film highlights STA vehicle team
St. Thomas Academy's Experimental Vehicle Team will be featured in a documentary at 7 p.m. March 22 on Twin Cities Public Television. The 28-minute film, called "Drive, the Engineer," follows the team as it designs, builds and races an electric vehicle.
The team created two lithium-ion battery-powered vehicles — "Alpha" and "Beta" — to race in the battery electric urban concept division of the 2014 Shell Eco-Marathon competition last spring. They spent more than 2,800 hours and 8 months building the vehicles. St. Thomas placed second and third.
Team members included Robert D'Agostino, Ian Nichols, Joseph Muske, Grant Grojean, Jack Ryan, Connor Shea, Nicholas Michalik, Matthew Michalski, Branick Weix, Colin Berg, Carter Swedal, Timothy D'Agostino, William Dietz, Brendan Quinlan and Samuel Westlake.
The documentary was produced by Broadcast and Design Group, with support from St. Thomas Academy and Power Systems Research.
To find a channel broadcasting the program, go to: http://bit.ly/1zLLD1I. The documentary is available on YouTube at http://youtu.be/Nuc1zV6a-AA.
Burnsville- Eagan-Savage
Fourth-graders explore passions
Students in teacher Jon Abrahamson's class at Vista View Elementary are spending time exploring their passions with "Genius Hour." The concept, which originated with engineers at Google, lets kids choose a topic to investigate for one hour every Thursday. Genius Hour projects have three requirements in Abrahamson's class: they must involve some kind of learning, the project must demonstrate that learning and students should have fun.
Abrahamson introduced the idea last year to encourage kids to explore their own interests.
Students are learning about Guatemala, website creation and surviving in the wild, among other topics. Later this year, they will present their work with reports, digital storybooks or infographics.
