Eastside Prep Tech Academic Teams

Eastside Prep, has made the following adjustments to our technology academic teams due to the constraints and opportunities associated with EPSRemote.

For the Middle School, we will be pursuing programming and algorithmic thinking by running a MinecraftEdu club while we wait for more information on the First Lego League. There are many fun competitive challenges that we can employ between our students to further their understanding and that system is tailored to our current remote environment. As with everything we do, as conditions change and we receive more information, we will reevaluate this decision. At the moment, this is the best way for us to have our students learn about technology applications.

Students interested in either MinecraftEdu or FLL should contact Sarah Hollingshead at shollingshead@eastsideprep.org.

For the Upper School, we will focus on being a distributed engineering team building a robot. This is a modern requirement in engineering workplaces and there are many things that can be learned. Pending the release of the 2020-21 FTC game, we will likely use that framework as our metrics of success, however, we will not be officially competing for a variety of reasons. This is a decision that the Upper School Robotics team has agreed to and they are excited about spending a season directing their learning to account for the remote environment.

Fusor continues to operate remotely, as it has since March of this year. For the next few months, there is still a variety of modeling and projects that can be done remotely. In addition, the team continues to produce and consume a series of educational talks on subjects from mathematics and computer simulations, over CAD tools and medical use of radiation, to machine learning and astrophysics.

Students interested in Fusor or Upper School Robotics should contact Gunnar Mein at gmein@eastsideprep.org.

The Electric Car Club will hit pause as we get the school year underway. We are excited to bring small groups on to work on the car when conditions allow. Unfortunately, we are not at that point yet. Stay tuned.

Students interested in electric car club should contact Derek Clarke at dclarke@eastsideprep.org.

We would like to thank all the coaches of our academic teams for making prudent forward-looking decisions. They are not just adapting to the new constraints but finding opportunities to leverage our current situation into teaching modern workplace practices. As with any decision, a lot more thinking has been at play than is displayed in the few paragraphs above. If you have any questions or concerns, let Jonathan Briggs know at jbriggs@eastsideprep.org.