Students at Forsyth County's Vickery Creek Elementary School won second place in the Siemans "We can change the world," environmental contest. The students, led by teacher Laura Fedorchuk, turned their concern over the use of plastic shopping bags into action. They created an awareness campaign to urge local grocers to offer shoppers alternatives to plastic bags. The students visited landfills and compiled data to help their case. They created posters, produced informational videos and sold reusable bags to parents.
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The academic team of the North Cobb~Harrison High School Naval JROTC recently competed in the inaugural Naval JROTC National Brain Brawl Competition. Team members are: Christopher Tiller (Captain), Derrick Kerns, Nicholas Arehart and Calvin Deussel. Their coach is Joel C. Reaves, senior naval science instructor at North Cobb.
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Erica Nicole Staton of DeKalb's Druid Hills High School has been awarded a Fulbright Classroom Teacher Exchange grant to teach in England for the 2011-2012 academic year. Winners of the grants are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, and leadership potential. Nationally, 60 people were selected.
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Erin L. Redmond and Zachary T. Falgout, students at Georgia Tech, are attending this year's Michelin Challenge Bibendum in Berlin. Only a few students from the United States have been invited to attend. They was chosen by their professors to take part. The forum showcases technological advances and test-driving the latest and fastest in clean vehicles.
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Students at McClure Middle School in Kennesaw now know what it feels like to be six inches tall. Math teacher Rebecca Fischhaber's classroom was recently filled with items like a giant doughnut, a three-foot high pink nail polish bottle and earphones as tall as a student. In an exercise on scale and proportion, she asked her students to create everyday objects that would be larger than real life to show how dilations work. "The exact assignment required the kids to measure their height in inches and divide it by six, since we are pretending to be six inches tall," said Fischhaber. "Doing this gave them their scale factor. They, then had to take an item (anything they wanted) and dilate it. They measured the original dimensions of their object and then multiplied by their scale factor to get the new dimensions of their large object. If students worked in pairs, they first had to find the mean of their heights and then divide by six."
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