GATE: Gifted and Talented EducationTrack C-3 Descriptions
Engineering and Designing Habitats
In this class, children will learn about animal habitats, the importance of conservation, and how to create engaging and safe environments for both animals and visitors. The curriculum includes hands-on activities like model building and creative workshops on habitat design. The program fosters creativity, environmental awareness, and a deep appreciation for wildlife, giving young minds a foundational understanding of how modern zoos operate and contribute to conservation efforts.
Friday: Review of Zoo Design projects from college students; learn about the design process; start your own design
Saturday: In-class model making
Sunday: In-class model making; Student presentation
STEM Careers: Road Trippin' Through Immersive Modeling
A scenic tour of roadside attractions and architectural model making through experimental media practice. Experimental media is a broad term that refers to any form of media production that challenges the conventions, norms, and expectations of mainstream genres and audiences.
In this course we will set out to study the fantastical world of roadside architecture and design an attraction of our own. Jump in for this joyride through the history of roadside thematic design case studies, explorations of wacky attractions and the world building around them. Oftentimes these roadside attractions are surreal caricatures, bizarro Disney theme-park-like structures, built to human and automobile scale. These odd structures are the outliers of architectural practice yet remain so memorable when we encounter them in the built environment. Our students are invited to be passengers on this journey and design architectural models that take a passion of their own and make an attraction from it. As a vehicle to view our designs, a remote-control car with a hood mounted webcam will be used to explore a “highway of designs” that allow our students to tour each other's structures on a “model scale” perspective, almost as if they are really there.
Catch ya on the road!
Cookie Design
In this class students will learn how to decorate sugar cookies using royal icing. A variety of techniques will be introduced, such as flooding, outlining, wet on wet, etc. Students will come away with new knowledge and 8 decorated sugar cookies.
Day 1: Basic of royal icing. What is it? How do I hold the bag? What are the different consistencies? What is the technique for making different shapes and controlling the flow? Basic flood and outline one cookie. Learn sectioning, crusting, and flooding.
Day 2: Wet-on-wet techniques, painting and watercolor
Day 3: Create your own design out of a basic shape.