BUCKLAND — What happens when high school students spend a semester on projects they really care about?
Find out Thursday at the Mohawk Trail Regional School system’s open house and “Interactive Showcase of Authentic Learning” from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Mohawk Trail Regional High School.
There will be a Capstone fashion show and two Capstone Galleries, where students and advisors will explain this year’s projects to parents and others at the open house.
Some of the Capstone projects Mohawk students chose include fashion design, farming, genetics, professional gaming, antique car restoration, the effects of music on learning, siting a house, building and designing baseball dugouts, and website design.
Students will be talking about their projects during Senior Capstone presentations Thursday night.
“It’s really hard for people to imagine what education is like for children experiencing it today,” said Sarah Jetzon, curriculum director for Mohawk Trail schools. “This is the first year (Capstone) really went live with all our seniors. It was cathartic for them to present to their peers. Then people got excited about it; families wished they could come see it. So we really made an event of it.
“Also, we just want to open up our classrooms and give families an experience of what our kids are doing. There’s inquiry, there’s student-driven, independent work. It’s not about sitting in a lecture and doing a worksheet,” Jetzon said.
The Senior Capstone course is now required for seniors to explore in-depth a subject of their choosing. It began as a pilot project three years ago and was an optional course until this year.
About 51 seniors focused on projects this fall that ranged from constructing a wooden bicycle rack for Mohawk to creating bacteria that glows; from gathering GPS weather data from a helium balloon to studying the effects of social media on adolescent depression.
Tori Cusimano’s Capstone project was “the rise of mass incarceration” in U.S. prisons and jails and how the criminal justice system played a role. Her study also focused on the response — such as the “Black Lives Matter” movement — from communities harmed by the system. She put her findings into a film.
Cusimano said she attended the Women’s March in Washington D.C. in January, and would like to become a civil rights lawyer.
“I’m African-American. My grandfather walked in Selma (Ala.) and with Martin Luther King in Washington, D.C.,” she said. When asked what she learned, Cusimano said “there was a lot of crying” over the subject and she wanted to walk away from it at times. “Netflix got me through it,” she said.
Maximillian Carr of Shelburne Falls set out to build an instrument package and camera to go into the stratosphere on a meteorological balloon. Upon landing, the package will connect to a cellular network and give its location, so that it can be recovered.
Student Sophie Raphael taught eighth grade for a week, during her project on whether music can affect a child’s ability to learn and retain information.
Dan Szafran’s Capstone topic was “Parkour: Overcoming Obstacles.” Szfran said Parkour is a movement discipline and the “study of moving with obstacles as a pathway.”
“It started as a military discipline, an obstacle course,” he explained, “but it can be used to overcome mental blocks. Athletes are put into dangerous situations that they have been trained for. I made a short film of myself (doing Parkour).”
Szfran sees this physical discipline as a hobby, but says “the mental techniques are applicable for anything.”
Torsten Sloan-Anderson’s project was “Glowing Animals, Designer Babies and a Chickenosaurus: A Look into Genetic Engineering.”
Anderson of Ashfield said he made glowing bacteria. “I wanted to make that and look at what could happen to genetic engineering in the future,” said Sloan-Anderson, who would like to work in chemical engineering.
Compared to an independent study project he had the year before, the Capstone project was “self-driven,” Sloan-Anderson said. “You had to find the drive within yourself,” he said.
“There was a deadline, but you had to set your own goals,” added Szfran.
The four teachers working with the Capstone students said the students who are the most passionate about their subjects seem to come up with amazing projects.
“I learn something every year, because the projects are so varied,” said English teacher Bill Drake. “This is differential learning to the upmost.”
When asked how to teach a Capstone course, where each student is doing something different, Drake said the teachers have worked together to have specific units within the course: formulating the idea; researching; interviewing and presenting the material.
Instead of presenting their finished work to the teacher, “they’re presenting it to a real audience,” Drake said. “It’s a different dynamic.”
Visitors to Thursday’s open house will find pre-school through Grade 6 exhibits from Hawlemont, Sanderson Academy, Buckland Shelburne Elementary, Colrain Central, and the Heath Elementary School. The open house will be broken into different sessions and those attending can explore art-making, robotics, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) projects.
There will be talks for families on 21st-century media, preparing for college, cybersafety and digital literacy, world languages and sessions on transitioning to high school at Mohawk.
You can try a robotics challenge or create a 3-D object using computer-aided design. In the cooking room, visitors can watch students prepare food and sample their creations.