MS volleyball club wraps up season

The Middle school volleyball club is wrapping up its spring season.

This awesome group of students have worked hard learning new skills, playing games, and just having fun!

Thanks to parent volunteer Jenn Tessier for participating this spring.

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Twin State Math League Junior All-Star Meet

Congratulations to Luke Pomeroy and Maddy Snide for their participation in the Twin State Math League Junior All-Star meet held on May 22nd!

Special congrats to Luke who earned a 5th place finish! Thank you to both for doing a tremendous job representing our school!!

WUMS QSA Club designs gender neutral bathroom signs

Middle School QSA Club designed gender neutral bathroom signs for Woodstock Elementary upon request of their students, and placed them on the doors of two single bathrooms. The signs simply said: Everyone's Bathroom.

8th grade students explore artificial intelligence

As artificial Intelligence becomes a routine presence in our lives, 8th grade English students have begun investigating how AI creates and sorts natural human language. Students began by looking at artificial intelligence broadly, and took a homemade Turing Test to see whether they could tell the difference between human and AI artists, musicians, and writers. Then we took a deep dive into StoryQ, an AI text classification model that took us behind the scenes to see how a machine "reads" human text, identifies key words, and assigns them negative or positive weights to make predictions about the overall sentiment, or tone.

Students fed StoryQ ice cream reviews, then analyzed the words the machine used to make its predictions about sentiment. Some of the machine's decisions surprised us. For instance, it assigned a heavy negative weight to "like" and "just," which were sometimes used positively. It was also flummoxed by sarcasm :). At first, StoryQ was only able to predict 78% of reviews accurately, so we analyzed error cases and proposed new language rules to improve the model.

Once we understood more about how AI generates and classifies text, we turned our attention to its limitations and its role in our lives. We looked at news stories and discussed whether AI is sentient, and whether it will ultimately improve or worsen human communication, and human life. Students raised concerns from disinformation to job loss. Below is an AI-generated image of 8th graders having a fishbowl-style discussion, courtesy of DALLE-2, and an actual image of our class doing the same thing.

Middle school knitting and crocheting club stays busy

The middle school Knitting/Crocheting Club is on fire! These students are making hats, scarves, and blankets, and they've been experiencing first hand how satisfying this craft can be.

Did you know that the rhythmic and repetitive nature of knitting/crocheting actually releases hormones that decrease stress and increase cognitive clarity?

It's been wonderful to observe the calm that comes over the room when the students are all focused and busy, and it's been a pleasant surprise to witness some of the profound conversations that have arisen out of this space.

One example happened last week, when they had a lively discussion on whether or not the U.S. was justified in dropping a nuclear bomb during World War II. They were so thoughtful and respectful of each other as they all wrestled with this challenging topic, while simultaneously wrestling with the yarn in their hands. Wow, and I thought we were just making scarves!