Maryann Will Retires After 47 Years

STEAM projects are rich with opportunities to make connections between science, art, and math. Students become innovators and engineers while exploring new technologies. Grade 3 students learned about interdependent systems that help ecosystems thrive while gaining foundational critical thinking and inquiry skills. Grade 9 students honed higher executive functioning skills like collaboration, adaptable thinking, and project management as they dabbled in human-centered design.

Lower School Science Specialist Beatrice Winter began the unit with a discussion, asking students what

they knew and didn’t know about fungus. Students explored the different families of fungi and learned that they include mushrooms, molds, yeast, and lichen. Guest speaker Upper School Science Teacher Will Robertson guided the students on a mushroom hunt on campus, teaching the girls how to identify different species. They dissected mushrooms in the classroom to learn each part and conducted taste tests.

Through their explorations, Grade 3 students learned that mushrooms are the fruit of mycelium, a critical structure of ecosystems whose main function is to convert organic material into nutrients. They discovered that mycelium is an interdependent system that helps organisms, like trees, communicate and send necessary nutrients back and forth. Grade 3 students exemplified their newfound knowledge by making observational drawings and a 3D diagram of the mycelium web.

Grade 3 students activate the mycelium in a mulch-like material called substrate. Once Grade 9 students delivered their 3D printed molds, it was time for the grand finale—to make the mycelium brick. Grade 3 students activated the mycelium in a mulchlike material called substrate and compressed the organic matter. When the bricks were fully cured, they spread them out on a table and explored what they could make with the bricks. Some students used hand tools to make ornaments. Others combined bricks to make sculptures.

It's a lot of hands-on experiments and it's very experiential and I never feel like it's a problem for them to stay focused or engaged. They really love learning about science and especially incorporating art and design as tools to understand scientific concepts.

Science is everywhere. Science is about getting to know and understand the world around you. I want the girls to understand that they are scientists, they don't need anything special to be scientists. They don't need special tools to wonder about the world around them.

Beatrice Winter

Upper School Educational Technologist Stanley Johnson prepped his students for the project with a

quick review on mycology. He introduced how people use it to produce products, from sustainable building materials to leather goods and clothing. Mr. Johnson emphasized during the design process for students to think about how to design with their users in mind.

Students divided into teams, created roles for each team member, and began a rapid prototyping process sketching their brick designs. Students explored different shapes and the potential of a building system to create structures. Some groups veered away from the traditional rectangular brick design favoring triangles or trapezoids for versatility. Once groups had their final designs, students used Tinkercad to create 3D models for Grade 3 students.

Grade 9 students created molds for themselves to make mycelium bricks and are looking forward to conducting compression, fire retardation, and thermal tests in the spring. For the project's final step, students created marketing pieces for their product to demonstrate their understanding of the material and its potential.

One of the things I want them to get out of this is that there are true opportunities to make the world a better place with the things that are around them. When they realize this, they feel empowered.

As an institution, we always talk about explorations in technology historically thinking about circuits, wires, and computers. But this is a technology too. The exciting thing for me is that it's a cross-age group, and cross-disciplinary, because it brings in both mycology and engineering.

Stanley Johnson

Grade 9 students formed 3D printed molds to then use the mycelium created by the Grade 3 students to form bricks.

ATHLETICS

Alumnae came back to campus to celebrate a range of events, from a Friendsgiving dinner at Thanksgiving to Breakfast with Santa at Christmas. Many alumnae have also participated in our mentoring panels, virtually and in-person. Katie Ledecky ’15 visited with each division following her success at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. Sr. Anne Dyer ’55 came to speak with students, and many alumnae and friends joined us in the Cokie Boggs Roberts ’60 Theater in the Mater Center to listen to a talk with Steven Roberts on his book Cokie: A Life Well Lived, which was moderated by Cokie's niece, Elizabeth Davidsensr .