The TOPS Program, located at Marc Garneau C.I. (Toronto, ON), is a special high school program for students interested in enrichment in the maths, sciences, and language arts. TOPS offers a strong leadership program and encourages students to reach their utmost ability.
One of the many clubs at Marc Garneau is Chess Club, which meets at lunch on Thursdays. Chess Club is a place for students to test their skills against friends, improve their tactics, and maybe even stand out enough to qualify for the Chess Team.
The grade 11 calculus class began a new unit on curve sketching. Using their prior knowledge about the first and second derivatives of functions, students were able to sketch the slopes, concavities, and other key points of interest of various trigonometric, logarithmic, and rational functions.
In groups of four and five, the grade 12 AP physics students executed self-designed experiments to test the properties of diodes, transistors, and capacitors. They constructed circuits to measure the electrical potential and current at a desired semiconductor. Students attended lectures about semiconductors to help them with their experiments.
The grade 11 calculus class learned more about how derivatives can be used to solve a variety of questions. Newton’s method, rectilinear motion, and Rolle’s theorem were among the topics that were covered. Students applied this knowledge by creating graphs and diagrams to model different problems.
This week, the grade 10 ICS class studied new coding strategies in Java using Ready to Program. After learning input, output, processing, and notation techniques, students created their own code to interpret various mathematical problems.
The grade 12 data management class began studying the measures of central tendency and spread. The students furthered their understanding of standard deviation by examining how they are used to calculate the z-score of a normal distribution data set.
