Welcome to the 4th annual Science Symposium at Marin Academy!

Projects will be on display in the Old Gym on Friday, May 19, and then in Library 202 and Thacher Hall on Monday, May 21. Click here for the Directory of Abstracts. Click here for the 2017 poster gallery.

For a high school event, four years in a row creates a sense of permanence. This is our 4th annual Science Symposium at Marin Academy and it marks a transition point. We have expanded our department offerings this year, adding five new courses: the junior/senior electives Neuroscience, Oceanography, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and two courses under the umbrella of the new Marin Academy Research Collaborative, Exploring Experimental Design and Independent Research Level 1 (Level 2 will start next academic year).

Though our current 12th-graders are all working on their individual Senior Projects (which for the first time is required of all 12th-graders), all of our current students don't know an MA without the Science Symposium. Moreover, activities like Senior Projects, the Science Symposium, and the End-Of-Year Culminating Projects (which students do instead of final exams in the spring) are all ways that we at Marin Academy continue pushing our students on immersive learning journeys that break the boundaries imposed by traditional subject disciplines.

The 9th-grade Biology classes have culminated with students embarking on individual experiments for a second year. The students have spent the last few weeks designing, implementing and analyzing their own original experiments. These experiments are extensions of a particular topic from their year in Biology that each group chose to explore further and each experiment makes use of tools and techniques that they have become familiar with throughout the year. The 9th-graders tell their stories and communicate their ideas and findings with hand-made posters, information visualization and display with much thought given to how to effectively communicate all aspects of their experiments. This emphasis on visual display is also a continuation from a workshop given by Edward Tufte that our whole department attended last December.

Continuing along in the vein of communicating, though via a different medium, the 10th-grade Chemistry classes have produced videos of chemical demonstrations (Chem CineMA Project 2017), following in the steps of some of the most popular videos on YouTube. Now there's a job that didn't exist a decade ago: YouTuber. There are some highly successful creators who have built careers on informing the public about fascinating ideas. Last year Destin Sandlin, creator of the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay interviewed President Obama on his channel, a testament to both the success of the medium and our society's demand for educational content. Our chemistry students have to think like chemists, educators and producers!

As has now become the tradition, the juniors have spent the last few weeks collaborating with their peers pursuing some kind of question. The questions range from the pure science, with heavily controlling variables and inputs to their system of study, to applied and engineering projects where the question may be "Can we build this," or simply, "Can we make this work?" This gets to the heart of what makes a good scientist or engineer: creativity. As science teachers, we are constantly trying to improve how we push our students to connect the dots and synthesize new ideas, rather than us simply telling them things.

"How do you teach creativity?" is an age-old question that some may find rhetorical. It is quite answerable however--simply jump in. It is like learning to speak a language; immersion is absolutely necessary. These projects represent our students' immersion into science and engineering, pushing them to think creatively and communicate effectively.

The Science Department is:

Maribel Albarran, Laboratory Technician

Randi Bakken, Human Anatomy & Physiology, Biology

Tania Bettis, Neuroscience, Biology

Ellie Beyers, Chemistry, Department Chair

Jon Bretan, Advanced Physics, Astrophysics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Shawn Cole, Advanced Physics, Physics with Algebra & Trigonometry

Mary Kay Dolejsi, Advanced Chemistry, Chemistry

Liz Gottlieb, Advanced Biology, Bay Area Field Ecology, Marin Academy Research Collaborative

Stori Oates, Environmental Science, Oceanography, Marin Academy Research Collaborative

Mark Stefanski, Biology