Grade 6 and 7 Hackergal Hackathon

On Tuesday, December 17th, our Grade 6 and 7 students participated in York House School’s second annual Hackergal Hackathon. About 75 girls were ideating, developing, and refining a coding project using the Lynx Coding platform. The theme for this Winter’s Hackathon was Leaders in HERstory. The girls’ projects ranged from telling a story about a female leader to creating a “choose your own adventure” activity, and everything in between. We were also joined by three female coding professionals in Vancouver’s computer science industry who problem solved alongside the students and mentored these girls in an authentic way. We are very proud of our Grade 6 and 7 students who collaborated effectively with their peers, learned many new skills throughout the Hackathon process, and ended the day with tremendous pride and an understanding that they, too, are coders!

Kate Anthony
Educational Technology Coordinator

 

 

Gr. 5 Accessibility Expo

This fall, the Grade 5s have been engaged in an exploration on accessibility, barriers, challenges, and disability. Students have learned about what life might be like to use a wheelchair and using Design Thinking Framework, they designed assistive technologies to make an aspect of York House more accessible. Rory Dougall from BCIT’s REDLab, a rehabilitation engineering design lab, came into work with the girls on their prototypes. The girls shared their prototypes and talked about the process during an expo held on Monday, December 11.

This project started months ago, when Grade 5 teachers, Melissa Kanavos and Erin Reindl, our STEAM Coordinator in the Junior School, Jennifer Sharpe, and Science Teacher, Lela Ling, began to develop a truly cross-curricular unit on accessibility. They designed the unit to incorporate curriculum from Science (simple machines), Language Arts (paragraph writing), and Social Studies (citizenship) as well as create an opportunity to deepen the understanding of our YHS value of empathy.

Read more on this Grade 5 STEAM project here.