Lutheran Schools Week is a special time for Lutheran High School of San Antonio to celebrate what makes our community so unique—our pursuit of excellence, the opportunity to nurture faith with students and families, and the strong sense of belonging that ties us all together. Chapel Family Olympics Each year, our small groups compete in Chapel Family Olympics! Each chapel family, competes in daily games designed to promote fellowship, friendly competition, and teamwork. From relay races to trivia challenges and quirky contests, each day’s event will helps build stronger relationships within our chapel families. It’s a great opportunity for everyone to come together and have some light-hearted fun while bonding over shared experiences and building lasting memories.
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Two of our four robotics teams are heading to the wild card round next weekend at Veterans Memorial High School in Corpus Christi! They will be looking for wins and awards to advance from there to the Area Championship hosted at Wagner High School on February 22!
Team Mechanical Mustangs Citation 22857 advanced as an award winner and Mechanical Mustangs Secretariat 6407 advanced as an elimination alliance captain. All of our teams performed well both on the field and in the judge room, receiving multiple follow-up interviews, which always means they were in the running for more awards. Even better than teams moving on to the next round of competition, is the experience and opportunities our students gained throughout the season. Teams have been able to collaborate with teams in Puerto Rico we helped train on the Mission Trip last summer, visited with STEM professionals at major businesses, and interact and work with other FTC teams throughout the season. Our LHS robotics teams are poised to hit the league championship meet with momentum after completing league meet number three this weekend!
Teams play six matches during each meet, and the top ten matches for each team determine their seeding for the championship selection. Our four teams will be fighting for advancement to the Area Championship on February 22nd. More importantly, our teams are gaining experience designing, building, programming, and troubleshooting their robots as they learn important skills each day. Lutheran High School currently runs four robotics teams (2 all-boys teams and 2 all-girls teams), and we are excited to see how they fair as they get ready for the championship rounds. One of the ways students get to be involved at Lutheran High School is by presenting a science fair project. Over the past several years freshmen and sophomores in honors biology and chemistry have presented projects at different Bexar County Science Fairs. As we have more and more students presenting, winning awards, and moving on to the state competition hosted at Texas A&M, we added an additional opportunity for students to present their preliminary projects to a set of judges at LHS. We know this additional and early opportunity to receive authentic assessment and feedback from a panel of judges will make our student projects even better when they present to judges again in January. We know that building community is essential to the development of our students, and we love the way they work together in their chapel families to accomplish a task. This week each chapel family was tasked with the challenge to build a gingerbread house. They met Monday and constructed the house, and then we all met on Wednesday in the gym to decorate the houses and enjoy some Christmas music. It was a joy to watch the students work together, enjoy each other's creations, and build some great looking houses!
Members of the Mechanical Mustangs, Lutheran High’s robotics team, were invited to present at the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Core 4 STEM event on Tuesday, November 19. CORE4 STEM is a two-day celebration of education and career opportunities in “STEM” – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The CORE4 Expo brings students, parents, and educators together with high-profile STEM professionals, corporations, government agencies, universities, and colleges (https://www.sahcc.org/11-19-20-core-4-stem). LHS seniors who have been involved in robotics led demonstrations of our FTC robots, and talked with the students about their experience. Approximately 150 of the nearly 1,000 students on day one came through our event space and received a robot driver's license after passing a basic robot navigation course. Long time FIRST Senior Mentor, Mike Henry, who arranged for the booth space for ours and other FIRST robotics teams to demo for the students at the event was impressed with the passion, enthusiasm and care that our students exhibited in providing a meaningful and engaging experience for the 7th and 8th graders who came through the booth in waves of 25 or more every 20 to 30 minutes for from about 9:30 AM to almost 12:45PM. Our digital media class has been busy exploring different photography techniques this month! Starting with the rule of thirds, balance, leading lines, and other composition basics, they have completed various photo projects highlighting their special interests.
This past week, our students learned about lighting and helped create a mini “media day” for our senior cheerleaders and basketball players. After a few test sessions to get the setup just right, the digital media class utilized softbox and LED lights to capture some really awesome shots of our seniors! To wrap up the week, our Mustangs played around a bit with different shutter speeds and “light painting” techniques. They learned how to capture trails of light through various camera settings and had a lot of laughs! LHS students are preparing for the science fair, and on Monday after school, a current AP Biology student and two alumni assisted the students who have chosen to conduct research regarding microbiology. They partnered with the freshmen Biology and sophomore Chemistry scientists to revise their procedures and worked with them to prepare their petri dishes using aseptic technique.
Each year LHS students compete in the Alamo Junior Academy of Sciences and the Alamo Regional Science and Engineering Fair. These fairs bring in over 1,500 competitors across the Alamo region to network with like-minded peers and STEM professionals and compete for prizes and awards. Top performers in each category have the opportunity to advance to the state competition hosted at Texas A&M University. For the past four years, LHS has had top awards in the regional fairs including Grand Prize finalists and many Texas Science and Engineering Fair advancements. Completing a science fair project is part of our honors biology and chemistry coursework, and offers students the chance to interact with professional scientists as they present their projects. We love passing along a passion for doing science that Mrs. Rikard and Mr. Schuetze possess and hope to foster in their students. Presenting a real world project to be evaluated by an external expert is the kind of authentic learning that helps develop agency in students to do science of their own choosing and develop knowledge and skills related to presenting and defending the results and findings of their STEM project to panels of experts within the field of their project. Innovation Lab is a time for students to pursue their passion, practice a skill, or try something new. Each Monday through Thursday students spend forty minutes in Innovation Lab in their choice of activity. From Cricut Crafts to robotics, or athletics to praise band, we try and offer something for everyone!
This year we have a new offering, Classic Car Restoration. After spending the first quarter learning some basics, our students in this selection have been working on a 1967 Pontiac LeMans during the second quarter. After cleaning it up, replacing the spark plug wires, checking the plugs, adding a little Marvel Mystery Oil to the cylinders, and hooking up a new battery, this week they turned the key and hoped for the best. Thankfully, all their hard work paid off, and the car fired up! What a blessing to watch these students bring a car back to life. There is still a lot of work to do before they can pull it out of the garage and watch it roll down the road, but every bit of that work will be a learning opportunity! |