Science & Engineering Fair Gets an Upgrade

This year, the Santa Cruz County Office of Education is moving from a traditional science fair model to a Science Technology Engineering Arts Mathematics Expo to advance equitable access to inquiry based learning.

The STEAM Expo provides a competitive and a noncompetitive showcase opportunity for students in grades TK-12.

For the Competitive section, students design individual or team (max of 3 members) inquiry projects to compete for awards, scholarships and prizes. Top award winners represent Santa Cruz County at the California State Science Fair, the International Science and Engineering Fair, and the California and National Invention Conventions.

For the Showcase section, larger student teams (more than 3 members), clubs or classes may enter to present or demonstrate their ongoing work or projects. Categories are:

• Animal & Plant Science

• Behavior & Intelligence

March 11 • Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds

• Biosciences: Biochemistry, Cellular & Molecular Biology.

• Medicine & Health

• Chemical Sciences & Chemical Engineering

• Earth & Environmental Sciences Inventions

• Physics, Astronomy & Engineering Design

• Construction, Design & Engineering

• Materials Science

• Robotics, Computation & Mathematics Students can enter passion projects using the inquiry process. Start with an essential question that is of interest and that cannot be answered with a simple Google search, and needs data collection and analysis. Research the question using reputable websites, interviews, and/ or print resources, and document results. Create something — this can be digital, physical or service-oriented. The product should be tested for its effectiveness and data collected.

Invention Convention: Identify a problem in your life, or your family’s, use problem solving and creative thinking to solve the problem, develop an invention idea, and build a prototype of the solution, test and measure how the design solves the problem. If the design does not work as expected, how might you resolve the issues? Document and present at the Expo, including the prototype.

The 2022-23 Santa Cruz County Science & Engineering Fair will be in-person at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville on March 11. Students will upload their electronic inquiry notebooks, images, video presentation for judges to preview prior to March 1. Judging will take place on March 11 inperson at the fairgrounds.

Students will present projects in elementary (grades TK-3), upper elementary (grades 4-5), junior (6th-8th grade) and senior (9th-12th grade) divisions. Fair participants are drawn from public, private, parochial and home-schools in Santa Cruz County.

All participants (competitive and showcase) must register, including their digital materials submitted, online in zFairs https://ca-scc.zfairs.com/App?f=265369379f34-4800-94a7-674a1d002137 by the deadline, Feb. 27.

More info at https://sites.google.com/ santacruzcoe.org/santacruzsteamexpo/ home n

Are you a site fair coordinator? Interested in sponsoring the fair? Do you have questions? Email hwygant@santacruzcoe.org.

Stephen Kessler, Artist of the Year, Will Perform May 20 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Writer and translator Stephen Kessler has been named 2023 Artist of the Year by the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission.

The Artist of the Year award is presented to local artists for outstanding achievement in the discipline of performing, visual, or literary arts who have also made a substantial contribution to the cultural enrichment of Santa Cruz County.

Stephen Kessler has distinguished himself over the last 50 years as one of his generation’s most versatile and prolific writers, author of a dozen volumes of original poetry, 16 books of literary translation, three collections of essays, and a novel, “The Mental Traveler” (Greenhouse Review Press, 2009).

He has edited numerous literary journals and community newspapers and is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Classics, 2010). Locally in recent years, he is best known as a wide-ranging and free-thinking opinion columnist in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

Kessler arrived in Santa Cruz in 1968 on a Regents Fellowship to study with the first group of graduate students in the UC Santa Cruz doctoral program in literature.

A personal crisis the following year set him on a path away from academia and eventually into journalism in local underground and alternative newspapers.

After writing for Sundaze and the Santa Cruz Independent through the 1970s, he was a founding associate editor and writer with the Santa Cruz Express (1981-86) and the founding editor and publisher of The Sun (1986-89), another newsweekly, which was put out of business by the Loma Prieta earthquake — but not before its final issue chronicled that watershed event.

During most of the 1970s and ’80s, he was active as an organizer of and advocate for the Santa Cruz poetry community, putting on readings, writing reviews and essays in the localweeklies, cohosting with Gary Young The Poetry Show and Bards After Dark on KUSP radio, and serving as an intellectual and journalistic bridge between the literary minority and the general population.

In his journalism he infused the newspapers he wrote for with a poetic sensibility not usually found in that medium but taking inspiration from such expo - nents of The New Journalism as Joan Didion and Norman Mailer, politically engaged poets like Amiri Baraka and Denise Levertov, and independentminded essayists like Kenneth Rexroth and James Baldwin.

Since then, he has published hundreds of essays, features, reviews, interviews, and columns in dozens of periodicals including, among others, Poetry Flash, Exquisite Corpse, San Francisco Review of Books, East Bay Express, Los Angeles Review of Books, North Bay Bohemian, and The Redwood Coast Review (1999-2014), for which he received four times, as editor, the California Library Association’s PR Excellence Award.

Writing about Kessler’s book Moving Targets: On Poets, Poetry & Translation (El León Literary Arts, 2008), Lawrence Ferlinghetti called him “certainly the best poetry critic in sight.”

“Stephen Kessler” page 18