Danforth Wins Again!

On Thursday May 11^th a team of Grade 10 students from Ms Tevlin's and Mr Weight's Engineering Design classes participated in the first annual Rethink the Box Challenge where they had to enhance a human ability. The team wowed the judges with not only their design, but also their teamwork and communication skills. Well done Danforth. We are looking forward to defending our title at the competition next year.

MaST students recently made some 30-second films highlighting some of the projects that they have done this year. Callum and Martin made Ruebens Tube which shows off a device made in grade 11 Physics that shows a series of flames to make sound wavelengths visible. 

Claire made a videa showing a couple of Cartesian divers that she made i grade 11 Engineering Designand shows how a blood pressure cuff can be used to measure the different sensities of the two divers. 

Ishrat and Menna made a video showing off some of the many life-like Lego creatures built in grade 12 Engineering Design. 

Taylor and Elysia made a video that demonstrates the abilities of the top two hydraulic arms built in grade 12 Engineering Design.

On Friday March 10th the grade 10 MaST classes participated in the annual Stem Cell Talks Symposium at the MaRS district of Toronto. This was an excellent opportunity for the students to ask questions to leading stem cell researchers. This years focus was on stem cells and immunity. Not only did the students get to learn about the latest about stem cells, they also learned about the econmics and policies behind this groundbreaking research.

On March 10th, six Grade 9 MaST students spent the day of the University of Toronto participating in the 1st Annual Pharmacy Day. 

The students made their own sun block, extracted DNA from bananas and did chromatrography of flowers.

Pictured are Kangkan, Mymona, Lana, Emily, Logan and Sajini

SciTech Fair 2017!

Once again, a huge crowd showed up to the SciTech Fair. This giant display took place in the cafeteria Tuesday evening, March 7. The tables were covered with display boards describing the projects and the ceiling was festooned with molecules made by Ms. Durairaj’s chemistry classes.

The grade 11 Engineering Design students showed off their elastic-powered cars. They ran them in the hallway to see which one could go the farthest. This required that they go, which required making good design decisions and building skillfully. In the photo below Danielle is about to launch her Camouflage Car while Evan, Nicola and Emma are making adjustments to their Magic School Bus.

The grade 12 Engineering team brought their hydraulic arms. They had visitors form teams of four and had them compete to see which team could remove the most Stryrofoam balls and which could stack wooden blocks the highest. Below, Atiqil is supervising three young visitors and Elysia is giving instructions to one of her adult competitors. In the front Abida and Erin are checking that their arm is ready to go.

At the end of the evening, awards for the various contests were given out. The greatest tension was about which of the science projects would be selected to go on to the Metro Science Fair in April. Each school is only allowed to select ten and there are so many fantastic candidates to choose from.

Here you can see Nico explaining his project to Ms. Durariraj. He and his partner Isaiah tested anti-fungal remedies.

Here you can see Emily and Marysia explaining their low-cost robotic arm to a visitor.

Here you can see Sultan and Aswin with their glove that translates sign language into text.

If these projects do well, they may win a medal and may be selected to compete at a higher level. Before handing out this year’s awards, we honoured four of our students from last year who went really far. Calvin and Masum’s project won a gold medal at last year’s Metro Fair and then went for to the National Fair for a week and brought home a bronze. Andre and Frank won a silver medal at the Metro Fair. They also entered their project in the SAGE competition and came first place in Canada and then first place in the World Championship!

Below, left to right, are Andre Bertram, Masum Billah, Calvin Veenkamp and Frank Nguyen.

The students whose projects were selected are Aidan Farrow, Mikhail Szugalew, Annie Dennis, Nicole Fung, Sakib Junaed, Ryan Marsh, Sultan Emaish, Aswin Visva, Julia Pham, Anamika Bose, Emily Coughlan, Marysia Zaleski-Cox, Isaiah Burton, Nicholas Prouse, Camille Leblanc, Meghan Paleolog, Matthew Phillips, Marc Frame, Owen Anderson and Chris Knappers. We wish them the best of luck at the Metro competition.

Here are the grade 9 winners.

Here are the grade 11 winners.

Here are the grade 12 winners.

 
  Credit to Ruthie Sun for the photos.

Students have been busy building and experimenting for the last month or so and are just about ready to present their research.  Come out and celebrate all their hard work and maybe pick up some science wisdom in the process.

The fair takes place in Danforth's cafeteria on March 7, from 6.30-8.30.

At lunch on Tuesday Jan. 17 fourteen teams met to compete in the annual hot air balloon contest. Each balloon was heated for 90 s with a hot air gun and the winning balloon is the one that stayed up in the air the longest. The winning balloon stayed up for 56.8 s and was built by Adri S., Jonah G. and Manning W.. This was closely followed by the second place winner which stayed up for 53.5 seconds. This balloon was built by Fariha F., Tahiat S. and Prachyo S.. You can watch their balloon and others in this video made by Will A.