All That Jazz!

After a two-year hiatus, TOPS finally made a return to the streets of Stratford, dressed, as always, in their Sunday best for the Stratford Festival. Always a highlight of the TOPS experience, the Stratford trip serves to enrich the TOPS English curriculum through exposure to great theatre. This year’s lineup included Hamlet, Chicago, and Little Women.

Better Rate Than Never!

Rate this fit out of 10! This week, the TOPS Grade 12 Chemistry class conducted experiments to determine the rate of reaction of potassium iodate and sodium bisulfite + starch. They combined the two chemicals, timed the reaction, and watched as a clear water-like solution turned black nearly instantaneously. Kind of like the movie Venom, if Venom was (C6H10O5)n and …

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Formal Physics

Why didn’t that grade 11 physics student reply to you, you ask? Well, chances are, they were too busy fretting over their first formal lab report. After pondering the procedure and painstakingly measuring the position of a cart in motion over time, they had to piece the data together, navigating the foreign glades of formatting guidelines. They came out of …

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Lifelong Learner

Despite the limited time this week, Ms. Hermanovksy’s grade 11 TOPS biology class had the opportunity to focus on their “Lifelong Learner” presentations. Every week, two students present a topic of their choice relating to biology to help promote lifelong learning. This week’s presentations ranged from the future of xenobots to the benefits of mycorrhizal fungi! 

Lining Up

What happens when the TOPS grade 10 math class wants to minimize the weight of the food they bring to school while keeping calories above 1000? We use linear programming, of course. After an intense scuffle with matrices and Cramer’s rule, we found ourselves graphing constraints, sketching objective functions, shading in graphs, and finding points of intersection—all to find the …

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Duct Tape and a Dream

Congratulations to MGCI’s FRC Team, Audeamus 8574, for their performance at the FIRST Robotics Competition qualifier on March 27! The team placed 5th in the qualification matches and made it to the semifinals as captain of an alliance. They also received the Highest Rookie Seed Award and the Rookie Inspiration Award. The team’s robot reveal video can be viewed here. A …

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