Our 23 Graduating Seniors were accepted at over 55 different colleges, including:
Several Desert students participated in the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge this school year. The Challenge is an educational outreach program coordinated primarily by LANL, designed to give students access to the expertise and resources available in New Mexico and help them complete a computation-based project that interests them. Our three teams and their project titles were:
Sean Colin-Ellerin and Isaac Green
Title: Socialist Manifesto
Summary: made an agent-based economic model to look at the effect of the tax rate on overall equality and wealth distribution
Megan Belzner, Matt Rohr and Bjorn Swenson
Title: Arbitrary Precision Integers on the Cell Processor
Summary: created a library for the PS3′s processor which can handle really large numbers, so that the Playstation (or publicly accessible LANL computers) can be used for the purposes of making and breaking encryption
Sara Hartse and Katie Boot
Title: The Spread of the Black Death in London
Summary: made an agent-based epidemic model overlaying an historical map of London and then found disease spread and infectiousness parameters that provide historically accurate results
The latter two teams were selected as finalists in the competition (i.e. their projects were judged to be in the top fifth of all submitted). Megan, Matt and Bjorn won the Cray award for high performance computing, and Sara and Katie’s team won two Santa Fe Institute awards, one for best epidemiology model (epidemiology was this year’s theme) and one for best agent-based model. There were about 85 teams from Artesia to Farmington, and out of about 12 special awards we took 3!! Congratulations to all of our participants!
Thursday, May 6, 6:00-8:00pm
Please plan on joining us on Thursday, May 6 from 6:00-8:00 pm for Desert Academy’s Spring Arts Night. This wonderful free event will showcase the vast talent of all of our art students. Over 75 students are represented in this exhibition that includes paintings, drawings, posters, prints, collages, photographs, film, mixed media, and installations. The evening will also present our High School choir. The choir will be “donning” their GLEE faces for a group of pop tunes on Thursday evening. The choir will open the concert with “Accidentally in Love” from the movie SHREK 2. They will also sing Elton John’s “Your Song” and the beautiful ballad, “I Hope You Dance.” Every one of the 20 singers in the choir has a solo in the concert as well. Come and hear your favorite singers “break out in song.” Finally, we will present films and animation, including our two films that won 1st and 3rd place at the National Geographic All-Roads Film Festival. The art show will run from 6:30 to 7:00pm and the music and films will run from 7:00 to around 7:45. Please come enjoy this very fun evening and support the arts at Desert!
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