Annual Blood Drive

Westchester's Med Club works with the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center to organize and host a blood drive each year. This year's blood drive was early in the spring semester. Through the Med Club's students and sponsor Dr. Laura Sigworth, this year's blood drive collected 72 units from 56 eligible donors.

74 donors had signed up ahead of time, and some sign up on the day of. Donors must be 17 or older and weigh at least 110lbs, or 16 with parent permission and weigh at least 122lbs. Potential donors may not be able to donate blood due to factors including iron count, recent illness, or travel to certain regions.

Boeing engineer encourages students to explore careers in science

Boeing Space Exploration mechanical engineer and Rice University outreach program co-founder Tony Castilleja Jr. encouraged hundreds of middle and high school students to help build the next-generation of spacecraft during appearances at three SBISD schools and in a community presentation.

Castilleja spoke about his own life journey and his passion for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) during three campus talks. He spoke to 400 students at Westchester Academy for International Studies, 250 more engineering program students at Memorial High School and 200 Landrum Middle School sixth-graders. An evening public talk was also held at Spring Woods High.

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WAIS Student Wins Guitar!

From left to right:  Kevin P., James Napier,
Jordan Hudson, & Ron Hudson.

Westchester Student, Kevin P., was stunned when he won this Kona Guitar from Memorial Music!  Kevin answered the most correct answers to guitar music identification.   Westchester Academy for International Studies offers inter-semester short classes.   Kevin enrolled in "Guitar Music Around the World".    As a part of the class, the students attended a field trip to Memorial Music to hear flamenco, classical, blues, and rock guitar music.  

IB DP Students present on Ebola

Juniors and seniors enrolled in International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IB DP) sciences at WAIS held a special presentation event at the school to share their work and ideas on the Global Effects of the Ebola Outbreak.

The special public presentation involved groups of students in biology, chemistry and physics working as teams as they brainstormed, and created comprehensive plans focused on team research, exploration and design related to Ebola.

Read the rest of the article on SbisdSnapshots.blogspot.com

Important: MySBISD.com Accounts going away

Secondary students will no longer have @mysbisd.com accounts, and will instead have @mysbisd.org accounts. This does include a few new features. However, and most importantly, any files, emails, or sites you've created, worked on, or received on your mysbisd.com account will be deleted on December 19th.

You will have to transfer over any work that you want to keep.

Please see the video on YouTube on how to transfer files in Google Drive to the new account. Please see the video on Vimeo on how to transfer a Google Site to the new account.

You may also find the following article from lifehacker useful:
How to Migrate your Entire Google Account to a New One

Students Participate in Hour of Code

More than 20% of WAIS students participated in Hour of Code. Many of those that did, participated in multiple hours as well. Over half of sixth and eighth grade participated, as well as a fair number of high school students in tech/design courses and many in upper level math courses. See our Hour of Code page for examples of just a few of the ways our students participated.

Hour of Code started as a US initiative to increase exposure and awareness of Computer Science, and quickly became a worldwide event, across 180 countries. The demand for computer scientists and programmers is expanding much, much faster than our society creates. This isn't because its hard or because the pay isn't good. Programmers and computer scientists make good pay and have a lot of benefits. The bigger issue is a lack of awareness for students.

Many countries around the world begin teaching computer science in elementary, some at the same time they begin teaching children how to read. At most US schools, students are lucky if they have the option to take a computer science course by the time they get to high school. Only around 10% of high school students nationwide have the option of taking a computer science course, because roughly only 1 in 10 high schools in the US offer Computer Science.

Sure, not every student is going to become a programmer, but not every student is going to become a scientist, writer, historian, or mathematician either. Let your student try an Hour of Code; because they should at least have the opportunity to try programming. Learn more about Hour of Code at Code.org.

West Houston students invited to Nov. 22 leadership summit

Excerpts:
The summit has attracted top Houston-area leaders to participate. Harris County Judge Ed Emmett; Spring Branch Independent School District Superintendent Duncan Klussmann; District 139 State Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston; KTRK ABC-13 Reporter Miya Shay; and Harris County Republican Party Chair Paul Simpson, among other leaders in their fields have been invited.

A sampling of the schools participating include Kinkaid, Northbrook, St. Agnes, St. Thomas, Strake Jesuit, The Guthrie Center, Westchester Academy, Westside, Memorial and Stratford.

See the full article on Chron.com