Published in the June 10-23, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By William Zahrt and Darren McDonald
The students at P.A. Walsh STEAM Academy participated in a free, three-month learning challenge called LearnStorm 2015 designed to build their ability to learn anything through mastery of math skills on the website Khan Academy. Points were earned by mastering math skills and also for taking on challenging new concepts and persevering. It is team-based — school versus school and city versus city.
The results are in: P.A. Walsh finished third out of more than 1,700 schools in the entire Bay Area which includes elementary, junior high and high schools. Khan Academy reports that more than 73,000 students were part of LearnStorm 2015 and only 300 were invited to the finals held at the Google headquarters in Mountain View. P.A. Walsh sent their top five students May 9; sixth-graders William Zahrt, Alex Lai and Tiffany Chen Chi; fifth-grader Jennie Lu; and fourth-grader Logan Lenhart. These five were in the top half percent of all students.
I went to LearnStorm 2015 and it was one of the funnest things we did this year. When we arrived at Google, we had to check in and get our LearnStorm 2015 shirts. After that my friends and I were split into the other 20 groups. P.A. Walsh teacher Darren McDonald was in my group and I met my new soon-to-be friends. We named the group we were in “Team Winston” after the Khan Academy avatar Winston and we also named our group Team Winston because our shirts were the color of the avatar Winston. After we named our team, we were welcomed into the competition by Mr. Sal Khan himself. Mr. McDonald scurried to take our picture together which is pretty cool. We played a quick game of extreme rock, paper, scissors and then we went to the competing grounds.
William Zahrt is a sixth grader at P.A. Walsh STEAM Academy. He and his teacher Darren McDonald wrote this for Morgan Hill Life.
