Over the last couple of weeks, including the two days over the Rosh Hashanah recess, WHSAD students have been engaging in numerous activities. These include working on community projects that started last year, service work that has students partnering with local middle schoolers to revitalize outdoor spaces, and academic endeavors that pair subjects and make for more dynamic learning.
The following are a few looks at what we have been up to.
Community Service Weeding Event at M.S. 126
This past week, WHSAD students were able to be a part of a special act linking community and environment. The middle schoolers of M.S. 126 were greeted by high school students such as myself and others, who were more than eager to help them with the clearing out and renovating of their school garden. Being that WHSAD is such an environmentally motivated school and has experience partaking in some of the same green-community benefitting initiatives in the past, such as the Lake Como trip that I attended last year, I guess we just simply couldn’t pass this up.
We worked long and hard into the testing hours of the afternoon, trudging through the overgrown weeds, dead plants, mosquitoes, spiders, and other creepy crawlies, all while the sun precipitated beads of sweat down our blazing foreheads. But, that didn’t stop us. We got down and dirty, venturing into every nook and cranny that Amazon of a garden had. We snipped the infested members off of plants, heaved the stubborn roots of invasive weeds from the earth, and raked away the debris of wilting stems (and of course, Mr. Codio brought out the hedge trimmers). In the end, we successfully removed the weeds and cleared a space for the future generation of plants to inhabit the garden. It truly was a special experience to get down and dirty with mother nature and connect with our community in the process. The students were really a joy to work with and have such an inspiring diligent work ethic.
-WHSAD Sophomore, Deselle Thompson
Lake Como Meeting
At Thursday’s meeting for Lake Como, Community leader, John Gibbons, came to discuss the finalization of the Lake Como Project. After last year’s winning design by graduating seniors, Joseph, Milana and Kaylin, it is time to start planning out the design and deciding when and how it will be implemented. With the help of this year’s sophomores, juniors, and seniors, each targeted topic was assigned to one or two students, who will come up with a presentation for the final draft of the project at the beginning of November. Topics that were discussed were zoning for the people’s homes, the Bradford trees the community wanted, the living shoreline, pollinator species and habitats as well as how the people feel about the topics at hand. To get a further understanding and range of the whole lake, possible field trips will take place like to botantical gardens or Domino Park to visualize what the lake will look like after different types of trees and plants that will be beneficial to the people and the pollinators. It’s important to finalize the The Lake Como Master Plan in order to get the Lake Como committee on board and start putting everyone’s great ideas together for the final Lake Como project.
-WHSAD Sophomore, Mahalia Sainteloi
Greek Theater Design
Overall I enjoyed the assigned project. But to be honest I volunteered to participate by accident. It was just another normal school day, and I was working on my assigned classwork when all of a sudden, Mr. Codio offered me to participate in something that when completed I would earn community service hours. I didn’t pay attention to what Codio said to me, but I signed up anyways. For a moment I didn’t know what I had gotten myself into until Monday. When I went upstairs, Codio told me we were going to design an ancient Greek theatre in AutoCAD. At that moment I got an awesome feeling about this. What I mean is that I got excited and instantly got to work.
I learned a new command in AutoCAD that played a major role in the process which was “Revolve”. What it does is that it creates a three dimensional solid or surface by sweeping a two/three dimensional curve around an axis. This command allowed me to get the job done. I had one flat side of the theatre and all I had to do was revolve it around the center of the stage and the structure was complete. The next step was to design the tunnels that go right under the theatre. To accomplish that I had to use another new command: “Subtract” and what that does is that it combines selected solids or regions through subtraction. Basically you have two objects connected to each other and you want to get rid of one but keep the space it took up. So first you select the object that should be kept, press enter, then select the object you want to get rid of and press enter again. The result is that now you have the object gone but leaving its space behind. I used this command to create the tunnels for the Greek theatre. Finally I moved on to the stage and that was it. This project took two days to complete but it was worth it.
-WHSAD Senior, Brian Bacuilima
Over the 2 day break I came in to be a part of a small project. We were designing our own Greek theater in AutoCAD, following some instructions in a video Mr. Codio left for us. We chose this project based on our Greek theater curriculum in English class. It was very easy to do when following the instructions. Our next steps are to personalize the theaters the way we want to and to create elevations,sections,and floor plans of a Greek theater.
-WHSAD Senior, Quiller Augustin