Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) to host Student Night at RTHS

On Tuesday, February 12th, 2013, beginning at 4 p.m., the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Student Chapter of the Mechanical Engineering Department of Duke University will host their "Student Night."  Five Carolina Universities teams will display their SAE-built cars and will answer questions on their design, manufacture, and performance.

Formula SAE Vehicle    

The projects on display will include Formula SAE (open wheeled race cars using a 600cc motorcycle engine) and SAE Baja (1 person off-road using a 14HP Briggs and Stratton engine). Checkout some videos of SAE CDS vehicles at http://video.sae.org/cds. These vehicles are designed and built by the university students during fall and winter terms. In the spring they take them to compete against 100 universities from the US and even other countries  http://students.sae.org/competitions/formulaseries. In addition to the 40-45 university team members, about 20 professional engineers from the Carolinas will also attend. These are SAE members and will be from Caterpillar, John Deere, BMW, Timken, Joe Gibbs Racing, and others.

Schools presenting a vehicle:

Duke University (Host)

University of North Carolina – Charlotte

North Carolina A&T

University of South Carolina

Clemson University

RTHS students and their parents are welcome to attend any option below:

4 pm: Come to the „Social Hour“ starting at 4pm to visit with the teams, see what extracaricular activites they are involved with, and ask questions. See the vehicles and talk to the students from Duke University, North Carolina A&T, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, University of South Carolina, and Clemson University.

5 to 5:45pm:  Stay for the Pizza and Soda. This will also be the time that the Student Teams will load their vehicles on their trucks/trailers. RSVP to Pamela Blizzard for pizza count.

5:45 pm: Stay for the Technical Presentations each team will give showcasing their efforts. Each 10 minute presentation will have 5 minutes for questions from the audience. Each presentation will be judged by professional engineers. Awards will be given at the end of the session approximately 7:45pm. Depart at 8:00 pm.

This is an excellent opportunity to talk with some very practical students at several universities in Mechanical, Electrical, and Aerospace Engineering.

SAE Baja Vehicles

SAE AeroDesign (maybe)

Outstanding Biology Poster Presentations

On Thursday, January 31st, 2013, RTHS students presented Biology posters to a series of scientists and engineers who came in from the surrounding community throughout the day.

The students were "outstanding -- composed, thoughtful and responsive are the few attributes I'd apply across the board," wrote visiting IBM IT engineer Craig Nygard. The posters were the culmination of a Biology unit on classification and new species. The scientists included visitors from UNC School of Medicine, The Hamner Institute for Health Sciences, NCSU, NetApp, the NC Biotechnology Center, and several scientists from Duke who have repeatedly identified and classified new species themselves. Poster presentations are a traditional communication tool that all scientists use in their profession, a way of summarizing and sharing their work with their professional peers.

Lunch with an... engineering entrepreneur

On Thursday, January 10, 2013, Hersh Tapadia, a serial start-up entrepreneur working out of First Flight Venture Center and helping to launch CertiRx, spoke with Research Triangle High School students about his unique career trajectory.

Hersh is a graduate of Duke University. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University. His interests include hardware design, power, wireless communications, medical devices, and business development.

Hersh is a young energetic passionate inventor of technology solutions and keen to share his experiences at RTHS's Lunch with a... series!

Lunch with a ... Plague Scientist!

On December 6th, 2012, UNC School of Medicine research scientist Rodrigo Gonzalez spoke to Research Triangle High School students about his research into the bubonic plague. He shared some real inside scoops on plague with a description of Yersinia pestis and the biology of plague, epidemiology, life cycle, disease progression, and plague research - from archeology to public health. A graduate of Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, who did his post-baccalaureate work at the National Institutes of Health, Rodrigo is an engaging and fascinating speaker for RTHS's Lunch with a Scientist series!

The Thing with Learning

How do we talk about education? What words can we use to name when a child learns? ‘Education is what happens between a Teacher and a Student’, a wise retired principal once said to me. Our principal, formerly a national award-winning science teacher, likes to tell us that no one knows how children really learn. And yet, I must talk about our school all the time. Local company leaders, interested in supporting educational success, or helping those most in need, or engendering the best in STEM education. Colleagues in other disciplines, of medicine, higher education, non-profit management. “How’s it going?” they all ask. “It is just block and tackle, day by day,"  I answer. They think I am describing problems, problem children.

I am not. I am describing how education happens. But what is that ‘thing’ that happens? What are teachers doing, students doing, together?  We lack a vocabulary to describe what this thing is. We borrow words from the world of business – “project-based learning." Or the stolen 1990’s wordage of “Need To Knows” and “Knows."  The too-broad verbs of our own pasts  - of ‘study and review.'  The words of math – ‘inflection point,' the ‘accelerating curve.' Or of sports – ‘block and tackle.'

We need our own vocabulary to describe – and to talk about – what happens inside a school when teachers are teaching and students are learning. We need a word for ‘started the year doing no work at a 40% and just kept plugging away so she now has a solid C in Biology." How about a word for ‘goes in for help with her favorite math teacher but won’t listen to anyone else’? Or “he and his dad spent an hour and a half at my husband’s office last night, viewing the Flipped videos and scribbling problems on the whiteboard’?

Perhaps we could steal from the vocabulary of mitosis, of cell division. Prophase is when the cell prepares for division. Some students surely are ‘coiling up their chromatins,' getting ready for the hard work of learning.  Metaphase is when centrosomes start pulling towards the two ends of the cell, bringing longitudinal tension from those two ends. Is this what we see when the children pitch a fit, dig in, say ‘this is too hard’? Are they feeling that tension of being pulled apart, between their childhoods of easy learning to the adult world of college preparation? Trying to stretch this metaphor to its end, I find the final stage of cell division, Anaphase, is too lengthy and complex. There is always more happening, the cleaning and mopping up, the next phase beginning anew. 

And although that fits in a way, this is not a linear process we want to describe. It is a series of events, a scatterplot of different moments, the easy, the hard, the brilliant, the infantile, over and over again, every day, every minute of that day. It is indeed ‘just block and tackle.'  But not by us.  By the students, the children. We watch, we feed, we nudge, we present and share. But they are the ones who must coil up, pull towards the opposite ends, endure and take advantage of the longitudinal tension.

And so, we lack the words to describe this work. Perhaps it is as in the ancient Jewish faith, where there are a hundred synonyms for the word God, but no actual saying the name ‘God’. Or perhaps it is as in the words of poetry, not ‘the things with feathers,' but the thing with calluses, with heart, with giggling, with aversion, with questions.  All I know is that our children are doing this thing, the thing with learning.

RTHS Awarded Department of Education Grant

The U.S. Department of Education announced that Research Triangle High School was awarded a $522,000 grant to use over the next three years to directly fund for planning, program design and implementation.  We are honored to be one of eighteen new charter schools to receive the grant.  In the official Department of Education announcement, RTHS is listed as Contemporary Science Center, the founding non-profit organization.

We are also honored to be featured in a Herald-Sun article by Wes Platt that details how ecstatic we are to have received the grant:

Durham charter high school lands $522k federal grant

It just got a little easier for Research Triangle High School, Durham’s first charter high school, to build on what started this fall.

The federal Department of Education has announced that RTHS was one of 20 schools across the nation and one of only two in North Carolina to receive a grant to support planning and development.

Over the next three years, RTHS is expected to receive $522,000. The other Carolina school tapped for a grant was Triad Math and Science Academy in Greensboro.

“Everyone’s kind of ecstatic,” said Pam Blizzard, director of external engagement for RTHS. “It’s funding faculty salaries, our digital media program, (information technology) costs. It will let us keep building the school as a vehicle for outreach around the state. It’s really great.”

The grants, totaling about $4 million for this year, are intended to fund charter developers for planning, program design and startup of new charter schools, as well as sharing best practices and disseminating information about charter schools.

“High-quality charter schools across the country are making amazing differences in our children’s lives,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a prepared statement. “These grantees serve a range of students, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and prepare them for college and careers.”

RTHS, a public charter school, is answerable to the state Department of Public Instruction and receives some state tax dollars, but not as much as traditional public schools. Charter schools receive no state money for capital outlay, for example, unlike traditional public schools.

Blizzard credited Amanda Marvelle, biology teacher and director of digital media for the school, for taking off the month of May to hunker down and focus on the grant application. Sandy Collins, parent of RTHS student Hailey Collins, stepped in for that month to help cover Marvelle’s administrative duties.

“We spent some time planning the grant, but then she just hid and cranked out a 50-page grant application,” Blizzard said. “I wasn’t sure we’d get it, because it’s such a competitive program. We feel really honored to be recognized.” By Wes Platt  wplatt@heraldsun.com; 919-419-6684

Read more: The Herald-Sun - Durham charter high school lands 522k federal grant 

Pieces and Bits: High School

The RTHS Raptor Repertory presents its inaugural show--

Pieces and Bits: High School

Join us for RTHS's first fall show, a musical revue about popularity, grades, and the rest of teenage life.  PIECES AND BITS: HIGH SCHOOL includes scenes from Class Action by Brad Slaight and music from Wicked, High School Musical, 13, and The Fantasticks, as well as Carly Rae Jepson and Justin Bieber.  Come support your fellow Raptors with a night of great performances!

SHOWTIMES
Thursday, October 25 7:30 PM
Friday, October 26 7:30 PM

TICKETS
RTHS students - Free
Children under 12 - Free
Others - $5
Tickets available at the door

Raptor Sports Report

Our cross country team took part in its biggest meet yet when it ran in the Great American Cross Country Festival on September 29, 2012 at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary. Out of 20 teams in the independent school race, the boys' team finished 10th, with two runners finishing in the top 25 out of 150 competitors in the field.  Madison Daniel and Michal Swepson finished 9th and 24th respectively. The team will compete in the final meet of its successful inaugural season on Thursday, October 11 at Durham Academy.

RAWR!

Lunch with a Scientist

Friday, October 12th, 2012, students had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Ward Peterson, formerly of Inspire Pharmaceuticals, who shared a brief history of his work in drug development for the treatment of Cystic Fibrosis. He talked about his educational background and his current fun job flying to Vienna, Washington D.C. and London consulting for drug companies. The students were very engaged.

We will continue to bring in a wide variety of community members to talk to students during lunch. Be on the lookout for the next topic.