Their design of a chair for college dorms has earned Burnaby South students in the school district’s new Applied Interdisciplinary Design course props in a national competition.
Grade 10 students Anthony Yuen and Pearl Perara were runners up in the 20th Annual Sears DX Canadian High School Design Competition in the junior industrial design category, while Amanda Cheung and Clarissa Martins earned honourable mention honours.
Colin Pinchin, Tyler Cao and Vincious Carlos were honourable mentions in the senior category.
The challenge was to design a portable chair for college student living in a small, shared living space.
Open to all high school students studying in Canada, the aim of the annual competition is to promote the study and awareness of different design disciplines.
For more information, visit www.dx.org.
Big art at Aubrey
A giant mural now adorns four exterior walls at Aubrey Elementary School.
Unveiled this month, the enormous artwork was a collaborative effort by Aubrey students, staff, families and artist Todd Polich.
The mural is more than 200 feet long and captures themes (community, multiculturalism and the environment) that students said were important to them in discussions and preliminary art sessions with Polich.
Nearly 400 students helped paint the work, which features West Coast species, like eagles, salmon and bears, interacting along a transition from ocean to river to land.
To capture community, it features a First Nations elder, mother and child as well as multicultural faces and active and imaginative children.
“I love it,” Polich said. “It’s great.”
The mural, at 1075 Stratford Ave., was unveiled earlier this month.
Celebrations en Francais
Burnaby’s oldest French preschool celebrated its 40th anniversary this month.
The Burnaby French Language Preschool (BFLP), now housed in a portable on the Marlborough Elementary School grounds, was founded in 1975 by five couples wanting French classes for their kids. One member of the group put up a poster at a neighbourhood library calling for others interested in a French immersion preschool. The rest, as they say, is history.
The school started off in a classroom at Suncrest Elementary, moved to Morley Elementary after parents raised $20,000 to buy a portable and then settled in its current location at Marlborough.
Parent participation is still key at the preschool, where French is the spoken by the teachers while kids communicate in English and advance to French as they feel comfortable.
For more info, visit bflp.org or call 604-432-1323.
