Fireproof

At the conclusion of the 2021-2022 school year, EAST at Warren High School faced one of the largest challenges any program could face by losing almost everything they had to a massive fire.

In true EAST fashion, the program pivoted to make the most out of what they had, and after receiving some new technology at the beginning of this school year, students buckled down to learn new hardware and software and traveled farther than before to reach communities beyond their own.

“We had to start thinking outside of the box due to our school catching on fire,” said Layne Dawkins, a 9th grade EAST student at Warren High School. “It has been hard with what little we have and how small the room is that we are currently in, but we have accomplished a lot more since we have learned new software and we have learned how to be more innovative.”

A group of six students worked together with the Warren Police Department to identify the correlation between stoplights and crime within the city limits, honing in on hotspots that officers can allocate more resources to patrol over.

Raven Harris, a senior who worked on the project, said the group of students began learning how to use ArcGIS and Survey123 at the beginning of the school year in order to process and display data presented to the students by Warren Police Chief Shaun Hildreth.

“We created a survey within Survey123 to input this information, and then created another survey of all street lights,” said senior Natalie Dawkins.

After collecting and inputting over 700 data points, the students created a visual representation of crime locations compared with street light locations around the town and will create a story map to present to Chief Hildreth and the Warren City Council.

While some students shifted their focus outside of their school, a group of four students instead looked inward to overcome accessibility issues students were having with school counselors.

“We felt like many students don’t take advantage of all of the services our counselors offer because of the embarrassment of having to ask for things like food, sanitary supplies and assistance,” said sophomore Taylor Hasley.

In order to help solve this problem, the students are creating a mobile application called “Get Counseled,” which will allow students to have immediate and anonymous access to several resources made available through their school counselors.

For freshman Charlee Wardlaw, who had never coded nor created an app before, using mobile app development platform Thunkable made the task easier.

“Thunkable has drag-and-drop coding which made our job easier,” Charlee said. “Our next step is to ask our school for approval to make this app available on all school iPads.”

EAST student Yamel Covarubias began planning for the future of their EAST program by designing the layout of their future EAST classroom within SketchUp.

“Yamel took the time to ask me what works best for me as a facilitator in the type of furniture we have, location of items, storage and best practices for classroom management purposes,” said Payton Sledge, the EAST facilitator at Warren High School.

“I loved the design she created and I cannot wait to see it brought to life when we finally get back into our building.”

Another team of six students partnered with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Gov. Mike Huckabee Delta Rivers Nature Center in Pine Bluff to create an educational video for one of their most popular classes: snake feedings.

“We spent a whole day at the Nature Center learning about the snakes and other animals, and recorded all of the feedings,” said junior Layton Wolfe.

Using Adobe Premiere Rush, the students compiled all of the clips together into a 30-minute informational video that was uploaded on the Delta Rivers Nature Center’s YouTube channel.

Their work didn’t stop there, however, as the students discovered that the nature center was encountering water filtration issues due to a broken handle on their system.

“This handle would be very costly to replace, so we got a 3D scanner and printer to attempt to scan the broken handle and print a new one,” Layton said.

Senior Peyton Sinclair said the team is now learning how to use Blender, an open-source 3D computer graphics software tool, in order to smooth out the design that the 3D scan generated in order to find the right fit for the filtration system.

REPRESENTING WARREN HIGH SCHOOL AT EASTCON23:

Raven Harris*

Victoria O’Neill*

Lilly Dawkins

Layne Dawkins

Natalie Cooper

Mya Casler

Javier Villeda

Mamie Martin

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