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April 25, 2022: VEX Club Dates, Family STEM Night, Celebrating Who We Are

 Dear Frisco Families,

Here is a BONUS EDITION of our STEM Newsletter, because I wanted to share some information with you. 


VEX Club

Wow, are we running out of days of the year. We have two out of six teams finished with their VEX robots, and the other four are VERY close. We need to add two dates. There will be no VEX on April 28. May 5 at 7:30 AM will be the last build day and a day to practice strategy on our competition mat. Students will compete with one another on May 9 at 7:30 AM. Thank you for bringing your students and for being flexible with all of our clubs. I know families have other obligations, and I understand you might need to attend to those.


Family STEM Night - DATE CHANGE!

May 18 at 6:00 PM will be Family STEM Night. We are hosting a friendly family STEM "competition," so this is one that you'll need to get to by 6:00 rather than it just being a drop in event. The rest is a surprise:)

Let me know your family is attending by completing the Google Form. Three families have signed up already! If this date no longer works for you, please email me, and I will take you off. We realized as we went to put it on the calendar that there was another event scheduled at the same time.



Celebrating Who We Are

On Friday, April 15, Frisco Elementary is wearing blue to celebrate Who We Are and to celebrate our differences. STEM classes learned about some amazing people in STEM careers who have physical differences and differences in how their brains work. We discussed Jane Goodall - zoologist (prosopagnosia), Geerat Vermeij - paleontologist (blindness), Richard Mankin - entomologist (muscle disease), Elon Musk - entrepreneur (autism), and Temple Grandin - animal scientist (autism). We watched a bit of a video with Dr. Grandin sharing what autism is and how it helps her be a better scientist.  To learn more, check out this Science Buddies blog about scientists with disabilities. There are additional links in each shorter post including one with a bunch of insect sound recordings (Dr. Mankin's specialty). I went down quite a rabbit hole myself.


Have a fantastic spring break, and safe travels!

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