ACADEMICS

GRADE 7 STUDIES HISTORY OF EARTH, CYBERSECURITY

Baldwin’s Grade 7 students studied the history of the earth and how the fossil record contributes to our knowledge of the past. They participated in a "make your own fossil" lab, which helped to explore what organisms create/have created good fossils throughout time and which organisms scientists know very little about because their features require such precise conditions to become fossilized. In the DREAM Lab, Grade 7 students learned about the IoT and vulnerabilities, malware, phishing, databases (SQL), encryption/ decryption/cryptography and more. Dr. Thomas Heverin (P ’26), Professor at Drexel University and Cybersecurity Systems Engineer supporting the U.S. Navy, zoomed live with the students to show them how to find vulnerabilities around the world using real-life, hands-on experiences.

Middle School Has Experiential Learning Day

This winter, Grade 6 - 8 students participated in a Middle School Experiential Learning Day, where online and on-campus students had fun and engaging sessions where they learned a new skill, made a craft or created a project. This opportunity allowed all students to get to know other classmates and teachers with similar interests and curiosities. Some of the sessions included creating video game music, making origami, bullet journaling, doing improv, participating in applied game theory and identifying personal goals and dreams for 2021 through a digital vision board.

17 Baldwin Seniors Honored by National Merit Program

SEMIFINALISTS

Baldwin is proud to announce that 17 students from its senior class have been recognized by the National Merit® Scholarship Program. Seven Baldwin students have been named Semifinalists: Christina Cappola, Samantha Eill, Sanae Hagino, Isabelle Lee, Diane Tian, Alice Zehner and Jessica Zhu; and 10 students have been named Commended Students: Hana Ahanger, Rhea Jain, Isabelle Kauffman, Taylor Levinson, Iris Li, Ava Olson, Layla Siahatgar, Maggie Song, Bella Xia and Bethany Xu.

GRADE 5 STUDIES EGYPT

Egyptian archaeologist Dr. Shelby Justl, a member of the Penn Museum’s International Program, met with our Grade 5 students to discuss everyday life in ancient Egypt, recent discoveries and experimental archaeology – a method of understanding and recreating the past by attempting these practices from ancient records. To conclude the unit, students presented their work during a Lower School assembly, which included CoSpaces coded and designed in the DREAM Lab to complement their research papers.

COMMENDED STUDENTS

Sonia Scott ’28 and Vanessa Von Dulm ’28 worked together on a CoSpace scavenger hunt about Cleopatra’s life.

Joyce Chen ’28 and Charlotte Lawton ’28 created their CoSpace focusing on King Tut and Queen Nefertiti.

Grade 11 Creates Personal Statements

After reading Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, the story of a high school student who uses personal writing and English class assignments to take charge and make sense of her life and world, 11th grade Baldwin students wrote personal statements of their own. Students chose from among the prompts that inspired Xiomara in The Poet X. They then turned their statements into videos, shared across the grade level, as a way to have their own voices heard.

(Top row) Josie Stockett '22, Nahla Yankowy '22, (Bottom row) Sienna Curley '22 and Sophie Cai '22 share their personal statements.

Grade 3 Uses TinkerCAD to Create, Connect

Grade 3 DREAM Lab students celebrated Halloween by creating monsters and then modeling them to scale in 3D using TinkerCAD. Students wrote a descriptive paragraph about their monster using language that explained the scale and shape of the monster's features relative to the size and shape of their monster's body. Then, they swapped descriptive paragraphs with a classmate, who was asked to draw and model their "swap monster" using only the description in the paragraph. Meanwhile, Computer Science Department Chair and Lower School DREAM Lab Teacher Stephanie Greer posted a call for volunteers on social media, reaching out to friends, former students, former and current colleagues, teammates and family. The volunteers received the monster descriptions and drew their own version. On the final day of the unit, the students were surprised with a presentation of all the artwork compiled. What started as an activity within the walls of two third grade classrooms managed to find its way across the state, country and beyond in less than a week! Drawings were sent from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Vermont, Massachusetts, Colorado and California, as well as some from Greece and Croatia! The volunteer artists’ ages ranged from 4 - 80! This project was a beautiful reminder of how we can be connected even as we work to stay apart and safe. Elise Markle '30 created Cara, a peaceful and calm monster.

WINNERS IN MAPPING COMPETITION

Baldwin students took part in the Draw-the-Lines Mapping competition, which challenged citizens to draw their own congressional maps of Pennsylvania. Madison Brown '21 was named the state champion in the high school division, winning the competition's top prize and praise for her "exemplary civic engagement." Isabelle Kauffman '21 took first place in the Eastern Region with her map and personal statement that stressed "modesty and acceptance of imperfection." Elise Kait '21 was awarded an Honorable Mention for a record-setting map that achieved the lowest population equivalence in the competition's history. Shania Mundy '22 won an Honorable Mention for her map that focused on compactness. Thea Rosenzweig '22 won an Honorable Mention for her entry and "outstanding personal statement."

LISA EVANS ’23 CREATES ALEXA SKILL FOR AMAZON

Over the summer, sophomore Lisa Evans created an Amazon Alexa skill that predicts a person's COVID-19 individual risk of hospitalization, need for intensive care unit (ICU) services or fatality, based on their age, sex and pre-existing medical conditions. She used a personalized COVID-19 prediction model calculation created by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community. The Alexa skill interacts with the person to ask them a few questions that they can answer verbally and then it tells them their predicted COVID-19 outcome risks. She presented the skill at the 2020 OHDSI Global Symposium. Lisa’s Alexa skill has been certified by Amazon, with the full support of the OHDSI community, and it can be used by anyone with an Alexa device in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia or India. Just say "Alexa open odyssey evidence" to start the Alexa skill.