Student Voices

Marc Bacvanski/Special to the Town Crier
A mentor works with students at MVHacks 2.0, a high-school hackathon organized by students. This year’s event, which aimed to increase gender diversity, recruited 30 nonmale participants.

Ten months of planning, organizing and soliciting sponsors culminated March 30 at MVHacks 2.0, a high-school hackathon I helped put together. The event took place at the Cisco Systems campus in Milpitas, where 102 hackers created 35 projects.

A hackathon is a daylong computer science competition that, despite the name, focuses on creating software rather than hacking computers.

There’s one question I ask myself every single time I think about assisting a nonprofit group: Why do we volunteer?

For some students my age, it may be because their parents demand that they do something more productive with their time than playing the latest version of Apex Legends or DM-ing friends all Saturday morning on Snapchat. Most parents know that volunteering not only looks good on college applications, but also demonstrates a commitment to helping others. That way of thinking also rubs off on students, who oftentimes think their humanitarian side will appeal to colleges, so they join a service club at school or volunteer at a homeless shelter.

Eileen Tse/Special to the Town Crier
Miraslau Kavaliou shows his Google Site to one of the parents attending the Climate Change Expo Feb. 15

Our Earth will not have any rain forests in 100 years. According to National Geographic, if humans continue deforestation at today’s rate, our children will live in a world without rain forests.

Each year, the deforestation problem worsens. Deforestation is one of the main causes of climate change, a topic that Santa Rita School sixth-graders have been researching for more than a month now.

“I would like my granddaughters, when they pick up the Constitution, to see that notion – that women and men are persons of equal stature – I’d like them to see that is a basic principle of our society.”

Those entering the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art walk under an ominous sculpture – a 26-meter-long smoky-colored dragon suspended from the ceiling. Squinting some more, they see the head is constructed of broken bicycles, its body is made of bikes’ inner tubes and its stomach is filled with thousands of peanut-sized toy cars.

This sculpture is the prelude to SFMOMA’s “Art and China after 1989,” on display through Feb. 24.

In the first week of December, thousands of schools across the country participated in the Hour of Code, a coding initiative designed to expose students to computer science.