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Welcome to the 5th Annual Science Symposium at Marin Academy!
Welcome to the 5th Annual Science Symposium at Marin Academy!
At Marin Academy, we encourage our students to engage in endeavors that are challenging and personalized. During the 2013-14 school year, we decided as a department that for our junior and senior elective courses we should end the more traditional curriculum at the end of April. We had all our students mix it up and work collaboratively across our sub-disciplines and pursue demanding research projects of significant depth. Five years later, now in our brand-new facilities, our science students continue this yearly tradition and we are in our second year of requiring completion of a Senior Project during May. With the seniors departed from the daily class schedule during May, our annual Science Symposium has become a culminating experience for all junior science students.
The numerous and generous donors that contributed to our Science & Innovation Center have made the Symposium possible this year, as well as our Board of Trustees, our head of school Travis Brownley, and our administrative, advancement and facilities teams. Because of the support and years of thoughtful planning and implementation, we have laboratory classrooms and beautiful and capable workspaces that have allowed us to push our students to pursue projects that would not have been feasible in previous years. Every day, we science teachers walk into our classrooms with gratitude that we have such a supportive community, wonderful students and families, and we have the daily pleasure of sharing our love of science and engineering with curious young minds.
With the capacity to support many individual projects, May has become the month of science for all grades:
For a third year, the freshman Biology classes have culminated with students embarking on individual experiments. The students have designed, implemented and analyzed the data generated by their own original experiments. These experiments are extensions of a particular topic from their year in Biology that each group chose to explore further, teaching our freshman that the layers of the onion that is science may well be infinite; you can always push deeper.
The sophomore Chemistry students have produced videos of chemical demonstrations (https://sites.google.com/ma.org/2018-cinema-project) for a second year, hooking viewers with what at first seems like wizardry, and then explaining the underlying chemical mechanisms that are more profound than magic.
The juniors in science elective courses have spent the last few weeks collaborating with their peers pursuing a question of their own choosing. Some projects involve an experimental question with either students gathering their data directly, or by consulting publicly-available databases from the mounds of data that is generated each day in research institutions around the world, just waiting for people to analyze. Other projects are more applied and instrumental and involve building devices that can be used for productive purposes. For some projects, the experiment is the device itself.
Seniors in the Marin Academy Research Collaborative will present the results of the independent research projects they have worked on during the past two years. You can learn more about the MARC program and student projects by visiting the MARC website (https://www.ma.org/page/academics/signature-programs/science-research-at-marin-academy).
Scientific inquiry, from the pure to the applied, is now possible for so many students simultaneously at Marin Academy, and again, all who made it possible this year has the gratitude of MA’s science faculty and students.
The Marin Academy Science Department
- Maribel Albarran, Laboratory Technician
- Randi Bakken, Biology, Human Anatomy & Physiology
- Tania Bettis, Biology, Neuroscience
- Ellie Beyers, Chemistry, Department Chair
- Jon Bretan, Advanced Physics, Astrophysics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
- Shawn Cole-Woods, Advanced Physics, Physics with Algebra & Trigonometry
- Mary Kay Dolejsi, Advanced Chemistry, Chemistry
- Susan Domanico, Chemistry
- Liz Gottlieb, Advanced Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science, MARC Exploring Experimental Design
- Stori Oates, California Coastal Oceanography, Environmental Science, MARC Independent Research I & II
- Mark Stefanski, Biology
- Steve Thies, Advanced Physics, Astrophysics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
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