The chemistry students spent 4th quarter studying the topics of nuclear chemistry, entropy, free energy and electrochemistry. They particularly enjoyed the weeks spent on the study of organic chemistry - alkanes, alkenes, alkynes, aromatics and functional groups. They built organic compounds, made and determined the properties of soap, created nice (sort of) smelling esters, analyzed the caffeine content in tea and studied the properties of carbohydrates, proteins and amino acids. The students will show off their laboratory skills on the lab practical given at the end of the semester.

The biology students began the last quarter studying plant diversity and reproduction and are now studying animal diversity, anatomy, and physiology. Dissection, microscopy, and experimentation have all been conducted in lab.

During the last quarter, senior engineering/physics students are learning quantum mechanics of various physical systems and hydrogen atom with Schrodinger's equation. They learn purely quantum effects such as quantum tunneling and quantum entanglement. In EDIE lab, senior computational science and engineering/physics strand students work together to finalize and prototype their projects. They also work on AirDuino project in collaboration with the College of William and Mary chemistry department where they are designing enclosures and mounting apparatus for their devices. Finally, in computer programming with C++ course, after learning all essential knowledge, especially object oriented programming techniques, students are working on a final project in which they program an ATM machine with all essential features implemented.

Students in the computational science strand have recently participated in two programming competitions—one for UVA's own High School Programming Contest and the other for CodeQuest by Lockheed Martin. While our students did not win the competitions, we are incredibly proud of them for participating and taking the initiative in their programming careers.

Students in GSST Computational Science are also participating in Great Computer Challenge at WHRO near ODU later this month.

Seniors in the Computational Science program have been learning more in-depth object-oriented programming with C++ using virtual functions, polymorphism, and pointers to make complex programs. These students have demonstrated an ability to design programs and implement them as necessary while maintaining best coding practices.

Students are in their final unit exploring 3D. They are learning how to plot points, graph planes, using coordinate traces to identify quadratic surfaces, identifying the domain and range, partial derivatives, and how to find minimums and maximums.

This quarter, students are learning about sequences and series. Did you know you can write a function as the sum of a sequence? The knowledge of Taylor and Maclaurin series allow us to estimate the definite integrals we could not previously calculate by hand.

Students summarized different approaches of solving differential equations, including the separable DE, solutions by the integrating factor, exact equations, solutions by substitution, Bernoulli's equations, Reduction of Order, Homogeneous Linear Equations with Constant Coefficients, Undetermined Coefficients by Annihilator Approach, Variation of Parameters, Series Solutions.

Students in the second half of this course ventured into more abstract concepts. They have generalized the properties in 2D or 3D real space to any inner product vector spaces, which has vast implications to other science fields, such as least square regression, best approximation, Fourier series.

Things are looking good as we prepare for the last test of the year with Practice Test 4!

Claire Chang and Olivia Chang (Tabb High School) were awarded 1st Award of Excellence for Senior Division at the Tidewater Science and Engineering Fair. The title of their research project is Flies on the Fly: A Novel Research on Thiamine as a Preventative Measure to Traumatic-Brain-Injury-Induced Locomotive Ability Loss. They qualified to compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair in May.

Hannah Bunting, Camden West, Alexia Jennings, and Kaitlyn Kinslow pose for a picture in the new GSST T-shirt that they designed.