The Spectator The Stuyvesant High School Newspaper A&E
Features
Multilingual McAuliffe
Best Breakout Artists of 2018
Meet New AP of Foreign Language, Francesca McAuliffe, with Features writers Lai Wa Chu and Jane Zheng.
The Arts & Entertainment department shares seven new artists to listen to in 2018.
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Volume 109 No. 3
The Stuyvesant Robotics Team participated in the Hudson
Valley Rally Tournament. One of their robots, Wildcard, won first place and their other robot, Mildcard, came in third place.
Senior Milan Haiman and sophomore Ethan Joo participated in the Math Olympiad Summer Program at Carnegie Mellon University. Haiman is being con-
Olympics
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14
Team
and the Hungarian Math Olympics team as a result of his performance at the program.
Senior Stella Ng and biology teacher Dr. Meng-Ping Tu were invited by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation to attend the annual Lasker Awards ceremony on Friday, September 21.
teacher Ellen Schweitzer won the Sloan Teaching Champion Award for Excellence in Teaching Economics and will be recognized at the CEE’ Visionary Awards and at the 57th Annual Financial Literacy and Economic Education Conference. Economics
stuyspec.com
Stuyvesant Receives Million Dollar Donation for New Robotics Lab By Ruth Lee and Saad Ghaffouli The Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association received a $1 million donation from alumni brothers Edwin Lin (’04) and Alfred Lin (’90) for a new robotics lab on the fourth floor. Construction is set to begin next April and finish over the summer in preparation for the new robotics season. Robotics Coaches Joe Blay and James Lonardo, along with parents Ellen Hartman and Richard Leung, were crucial in organizing the logistics for the setup of the new lab. President of the Alumni Association Soo Kim, Executive Director Sarita Prakash, and Assistant Principal of Chemistry and Physics Scott Thomas also contributed to the progress of the lab over the summer. The donation coincides with the start of the “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology” (FIRST) robotics preseason and the reality of a hefty price tag. “FIRST Robotics Competition teams always have a lot of unavoidable expenses. One competition alone can cost over $5,000 with registration fees and transportation. We also have to pay for tools, machinery, and everything else we need to build a new robot each year,” sophomore and Robotics member Nicole Press said. “This donation will help us with some of that so we can continue to build and develop our robots.” The robotics team has been enjoying a number of recent successes, including a 17-0 win at the International Robotics Invitational over the summer in Qianjiang,
China. Despite the team’s victories, however, a number of robotics members have expressed concern over the team’s current resources. “We have [...] 100 members, [...] and it gets really tight. People have to work in hallways; we have to go to other classrooms,” Blay said. Not only will this donation open up a new lab for the team, but it will also provide newer technology for the robotics team, which will create a much safer environment for the students. “We’re going to be able to fabricate parts a lot faster. [...] Because we were working with these old machines, it takes a while, and it’s also honestly just safer to have these new machines,” Blay said. Members of the robotics team agreed that the new equipment will open many more opportunities for the robotics team. “The renovation will improve our workflow. Many of the processes that we do now, such as milling, can be automated, allowing us to iterate more and improve faster. We hope that with a new space, we can help our members see their creations come to life,” junior and Vice President of the robotics team’s Engineering Department Eric Chen said. Team members aided in the process of deciding what new equipment the team should purchase. “We’re talking to robotics members about what machines they might like to use. Some of the machines we’re looking at getting—one of them’s a CNC router [computer numerical control router; used to cut out templates onto a hard material] and another one’s a laser cutter [...]—are machines that members of the ro-
Beaux Watwood / The Spectator
sidered for a spot on the USA
Math
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October 12, 2018
NEWSBEAT
“The Pulse of the Student Body”
At the Today Show With Stuyvesant Robotics: The Community Within the Competitions See Page 5 botics team specifically are very excited about getting to use. They even did some research to help me pick out the machines,” Blay said. Blay hopes the donation will help expand the interest of robotics throughout Stuyvesant. “Hopefully we get more classes in here, because my dream is that when we have more than just me as a robotics teacher, we [will] have more robotics teachers
[and] we [will] have more robotics classes so that any kid who wants to take robotics can,” Blay said. The donation marks a new chapter for the robotics team, one where Blay can see his hopes for the robotics team start to play out. “Getting this funding to really make this an awesome place for all the students who are in here, it was [...] unbelievable,” he said.
Launch of Talos Creates Difficulties for the Stuyvesant Community By Hayeon Ok, Annette Kim, and Misaal Tabassum
Last June, Stuyvesant launched a new student information center called Talos. A system designed to facilitate communication between students and parents within the Stuyvesant community, Talos allows students to view information such as their locker numbers and combinations, their schedules, and their pending textbook returns all on one interface. Students can also request classes for the upcoming semester and submit requests for online program changes. The latter proved to be critical as the 2018-2019 school year began. Talos was created to “make school processes more efficient and [ensure] that students […] do what they want to do and administrators do what they want to do,” Rodda John (‘17), creator of Talos, said. “The idea is [to] let the students give the information to students. Let them make the change that they want to make.” Though the site initially facilitated online
Advanced Placement course selections, its role regulating program changes in general quickly grew. Students were informed of the use of Talos for program changes just as the school year began. Soon after, students began making online program requests and receiving queue numbers for in-person schedule changes. Talos attempted to make program changes as fair as possible by prioritizing students based on their program change number, rather than how fast they arrived at the site of program changes. The system tried to be convenient for both faculty and students. The process of creating the site took “a lot of student input,” John said. “I get emails from faculty almost everyday.” The site allowed students to view the number of available seats in the classes they desired to transfer into and enabled guidance counselors to approve online requests prior to in-person program changes. These implications were meant to decrease the number of students at in-person program
changes and help alleviate the pressure placed on the guidance counselors. “We were able to make three hundred more program changes in one day than we made over the entire period last year,” John said. However, the integration of Talos at Stuyvesant caused many unforeseen setbacks. Some students vocalized their concerns and frustrations with the system. “I used it for program changes during my junior year, and it really did not go well at all,” junior Alison Juray said. “I requested a program change and it was really slow [...] because a lot of people were on Talos [...] at that time.” Additionally, many students who did not get their changes approved online had to go to inperson program changes during the first week of school in order to fix issues they had. They also faced issues with Talos, specifically with their assigned numbers for in-person program changes. Students noticed fluctuations in their numbers, as well as difficulty in obtaining them in the first place. “I requested three or four program changes, but
I couldn’t find my number,” Juray said. “By the time my friend asked me, ‘Hey, what number are you?’ I [was] five hundred-something.” In-person program changes were congested with students who needed to resolve issues. “They were going through the one-hundreds when I got there,” Juray said. As a result, many students left without even addressing their program changes. “I went home,” Juray said. “It was a super stressful experience.” Despite the issues faced by some students, others had more pleasant experiences. “I was planning on going, but my change got resolved before,” sophomore Anne Rhee said. Sophomore Emily Chervinsky agreed. “My experience during program changes was very pleasant. It ran very smoothly. It was not like last year when all the students were crowded into lines for each subject,” she said. Assistant Principal of Pupil Personnel Services Casey Pedrick explained that the biggest issue during program changes was the amount of people connected to the Wifi server. “Floors one
through five were all on the same line. [...] The entire counselling suite, the program office, then in the cafeteria where we set up [...] were all pooled on the same line, plus all of you guys who were refreshing Talos all the time,” Pedrick said. “Volume and capacity on the server [were] probably our biggest issue[s].” Guidance counselors also faced struggles with handling program changes in the best way possible. “Other students were doing more complicated asks. So when you open up the file, it would literally be eight inches of text, of drop this, add this, drop this, add this. It wasn’t even as neat as I’m relaying it,” Pedrick said. “At the end, you could only say yes or no to that whole request.” However, despite these issues, Pedrick is hopeful for the future use of Talos, especially because it is suited to the specific needs of Stuyvesant. “It’s very userfriendly and very intuitive,” she said. John also expressed his hope for the future of Talos. Though the system did have its setbacks, “It did work better, I think, than the previous system,” he said.