The fall semester wouldn't be complete without a visit to The Mount!

Today we made our third visit to The Mount St Joseph's Academy, always a favorite visit for the EAs. We had a full day visiting several physics and biology classes. Our EAs facilitated a wide array of in-class activities, from tissue engineering to squishy circuits, to learning about the red bull space jump and designing their own parachutes.

It wasn't just the extraordinary hands-on activities that made this day so great, it was also the amazing team of EAs. What made this visit even better than a year before? We had TWO new hands-on activities that were developed by our EAs specifically for this trip. Terri Creech and Lola Buonoma developed a tissue engineering presentation for the Honors and AP biology classes along with an activity to have students design their own medical device out of common household items, and then use this device to dissect a marble from a cup of water. It was a challenging design problem, yet the ladies took it on with energy and enthusiasm. Terri and Lola also ran the Rube Goldberg activity for a couple physics classes, which is always a  great success!

The second new activity of the day was a design of a prosthetic limb activity developed by Abby Krieder and Kathleen Prilutski. Using toilet plungers, sponges, bubble wrap, duct tape and rope, students were given the task of designing a prosthetic limb. From the images below, you can see this was activity was a great success. Students design their limb for a specific type of shoe, and some even dared to try them on!







In addition to all the Bio Activities, the physics classes learned about the engineering behind the recent red bull space jump. Students then designed, built and tested their own parachutes! Amy Szabo and Arielle Green were great design advisers and they even held a challenge for the team with the safest parachute by testing them to see which parachute took the longest amount of time to land.

With over 5 different activities being run throughout the day, we were kept on our toes, but one thing that did not surprise us was the talent and creativity we saw from the ladies at The Mount.