College admissions offices took notice. She can now add another bullet to her résumé: Pooja earned admission to all eight Ivy League schools. She was also accepted at Stanford, MIT, Duke, the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech, going 14 for 14.Even at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a top-ranked magnet school, senior Pooja Chandrashekar stands out among her brainiac peers.

She’s got a 4.57 grade-point average, scored a 2390 (out of 2400) on the SAT, and aced all 13 of her Advanced Placement exams. She also founded a national nonprofit organization that encourages middle-school girls to participate in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs.
She’s also developed a mobile app that analyzes speech patterns and predicts with 96 percent accuracy if a person has Parkinson’s disease.

Oh, and she’s 17.

To read the full article, click here

May 11, 2015

Ten Nysmith students were invited to the second annual Fairfax Science and Engineering fair at George Mason this Saturday. Shaan Bhandarkar, Richard Lun, Annabel Lian, and Yash Somaiya represented Nysmith in the oldest Division IV category, while Caroline Huber, Grayson Newell, and Kaien Yang represented Nysmith in Division III and Sahithi Atluri, Aaron Joy and Vidhi Sharma represented Nysmith in Division II. Each division had two categories: Earth and Life Sciences and Physical Science and Engineering. Nysmith students Shaan Bhandarkar and Richard Lun placed first in each Division IV category, and Kaien Yang placed first in the Life Sciences. Vidhi Sharma placed first and Sahithi Sharma second in Division II. Kaien Yang was awarded the Pasco Scientific Overall Award. Congratulations to everyone!!

Having earned the title of CyberPatriot VII  Middle School Division National Champions in March 2015, the middle school students at the Nysmith School continue to broaden their experience in and exposure to the field of cybersecurity by leveraging industry connections inside the Nysmith community.

The number of middle school students at Nysmith participating in the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot program has grown by 60 percent over last year.  This school year, these student Competitors account for nine percent of the middle school students enrolled at Nysmith School.   The three parent-Coached teams at Nysmith vying for the National Title in CyberPatriot VIII against nearly 500 other middle school teams this year are team “Goldendoodles,” team “Nysmith Narwals, and team “CyberArmour.”

Nysmith Parent, Richard Bejtlich, who serves as a Chief Security Strategist at  FireEye, and is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted the increasing interest in the cybersecurity industry among the middle school students at Nysmith and kindly offered to arrange a private tour of FireEye for the CyberPatriot VIII competitors.

Mr. Bejtlich noted the strengths of the CyberPatriot Program.  “It’s a great program that isn’t theoretical.  The integration of the hands-on material through virtual machines makes it a valuable experience.”

FireEye hosted the Nysmith CyberPatriot VIII Competitors for four hours during the recent teacher conference days.  The Competitors were treated to a luncheon, and interactive talks with FireEye experts from different divisions of the firm who explained in detail what they do and how their roles serve the customers of FireEye.  The students shared what they had learned about defending computers and networks as a result of their experience with the CyberPatriot program.  The tour of the Security Operations Center (SOC) drew many questions from the students and made a big impression with its darkened room, scores of computers, and the giant high definition global threat map.

As a simulated interactive exercise, the students were asked to pretend they were the Chief Security Officers for the Nysmith School.   They met in small teams and developed a list of potential vulnerabilities in the Nysmith network that could be exploited.   The FireEye experts moderated this exercise and validated the students’ findings.

Bejtlich, a parent of daughters in the third and fifth grades, explained how the culture at the Nysmith School helps to support learning beyond the classroom.  “One of the aspects of Nysmith that impresses me is the number of extracurricular and after-school activities, such as CyberPatriot and Odyssey of the Mind.  Another aspect is that the parental involvement is very strong and the teachers are very motivated.   These two facts come together and provide these opportunities for the Nysmith students.”

More information about the CyberPatriot can be found at www.uscyberpatriot.org.

On November 7, two of our Model UN club members had strong showings at an international conference at George Washington University.  Aryaan Hussein won Honorable Mention and Cameron Sabet won Verbal Accommodations.  Students’ next conference will be at William & Mary in February.

The First Lego League team, Structile Robotum is going to States! This team, lead by Smitha Regi and Denise Gillen secured themselves a spot at the State Tournament for the second year in a row. The team won 1st place for their project; a program and website designed to extend the life of electronic devices. Their project aims to reduce the growing world wide problem of electronic waste.

In October, they presented their project to representatives at the World Bank. The team also toured Securis to learn about recycling computer components.

Congratulations to Neha Regi, Rohan Regi, Kylie Gillen, Sean Gillen, Grayson Newell, and Anoushka Upadhye.

Job well done!

Good luck at States!!

Nysmith Alumna Sreya Atluri has been given the prestigious honor of being inducted into the first ever Carson Scholars Hall of Fame. These twenty CSF alumni exemplify leaders. They have demonstrated success and excellence throughout their lives.

Please take a few moments to view Sreya’s profile on the Hall of Fame website:

http://carsonscholars.org/scholarships/hall-of-fame/

All Hall of Fame members will be honored at one of the regional awards banquets in spring 2016. Please click on this link to view additional information about the Carson Scholars Fund.

Hall of Fame Press Release

The Nysmith School was recently featured on WTTG – Fox 5 DC – check out what the buzz was about!

They say that charity begins at home. Helen Yi and Taylor, the mother and daughter co-founders of Touching Heart, a nonprofit aimed at educating and inspiring children to empathize with the needs of others and to take action to assist them, have no argument with that statement. But they have taken that idea out of the home’s front door, down the steps and out into the streets beyond. Since 2010, they have grown a dedicated group that has produced “Kids on a Mission” (KOAM) – children who are taught how to host their own fundraising events from selection of a cause, logistically preparing the event, developing budgets and seeing the plan through to fruition.

To read the full article, click here

How a small school for gifted kids in the D.C. exurbs gets big results

By Glen Finland February 25 at 8:00 AM

Eighth-graders, from right, Caroline Huber, Lottie Dubert, Jessica Alewine and Neha Bhat work on building a polynomial roller coaster with graham crackers, marshmallows and toothpicks during their algebra 2/trigonometry class at Nysmith School for the Gifted in Herndon, Va. (Photo by Lexey Swall/GRAIN for The Washington Post)

It’s 8 a.m. as the yellow buses begin to roll up, bouncing with kids, and Carole Nysmith pushes open a heavy glass door. Under a late autumn sky, the 79-year-old educator wraps her coat tightly around her and takes up her regular spot in front of the glass-walled schoolhouse she built for them, the Nysmith School for the Gifted. Out in the parking lot, a woman slides open the back of her SUV to herd two boys, hurriedly stuffing their collared shirts into the required khaki pants. A father wearing Air Force camouflage holds his primary-school-age daughter’s hand and asks, “Got everything?”

Nysmith follows the mix of elementary- and middle-schoolers into the sun-washed foyer, and watches them stream down hallways filled with their chatter. In between hugs for the younger ones, Nysmith calls out, “Good morning, Caroline. Hello, Sammie. Hi, Zane. Have a wonderful day, Veda.”

“Hi, Miss Ny,” says a tiny girl shuffling under an enormous purple backpack.

The staff affectionately refers to the school’s founder as their “wandering grandmother.” She is still involved in administrative affairs, gives tours to prospective families and helps students in the Media Center, but handed off the day-to-day running of the school seven years ago to her older son, Kenneth Nysmith. The 53-year-old father of three, who goes by Ken, towers over his mother but wears the same amused smile as he strides down the hallways in a crisp green dress shirt and Star Wars-themed tie (Obi-Wan Kenobi from Episode 1), calling out to students by name. Every Nysmith teacher wears an ID lanyard, most of them sporting pins that each represent five years of employment; the average tenure is over 10 years. Ken’s badge reflects the fact that he has been at the school almost since it opened 32 years ago.

“My mom was a teacher and sort of had this crazy little idea for Fairfax County’s [gifted and talented] program. She saw a need for kindergarten through second grade … children who are too young to join the program and get them interested in academics early,” he says. “It grew from there.”

The school, relocated from Reston to Herndon, Va., in 2000, serves more than 600 kids, from preschool through eighth grade. As Ken Nysmith ushers a visitor into a gym with a rock-climbing wall, he says, “We’re noisy, but you’ll notice I’m not the bogeyman as we walk around.”

Backpacks lie in a heap in the hallway. Cellphones and iPads are visible, but he says theft has never been a problem.

“We don’t have a lot of discipline problems, because the kids want to be here. That’s not to say we’re perfect. We’re all human and learning to get along, but it’s beautiful.”

If the sales pitch feels a bit heavy-handed, it could be because the headmaster is keenly aware of the question that most new visitors walk in with: What’s so special about the place anyway?

On paper, Nysmith excels at the kind of metrics that make tiger parents purr. Its students regularly place in the top 1 percent nationwide in national tests for math, reading and language. The most recent Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth report included Nysmith as one of the Top 10 Schools in the World, and honored 27 Nysmith second- to eighth-graders for achieving highest honors in its above-grade-level testing. The school website’s list of high schools that graduates often go to include Sidwell Friends, Potomac School and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

Those results are impressive even for an institution that can choose its students. So how has Nysmith managed to do all this? Some education experts cite selectivity built into the very notion of giftedness. There’s also self-selection in the form of highly motivated parents willing to foot the average annual tuition of $28,440 (although the school offers some financial assistance). The school’s boosters are more likely to stress a rigorous curriculum and nurturing environment filled with people who “get” their students.

“Gifted children are different. They have different needs,” Ken Nysmith says.

“Traditionally they’re less mature, although intellectually they may be thinking a year or two beyond. Sometimes they are perfectionists, and some of it is helping them find that balance of ‘Where do you stop?’ That’s a challenge for these children. They want to know ‘Why am I different?’ They don’t have that sense of being normal because they’re thinking in a different plane.”

Students use pop culture to illustrate history on a bulletin board at Nysmith. The school opened in 1983 with 55 children, they now teach more than 600 students ranging from pre-K to eighth grade. (Photo by Lexey Swall/GRAIN for The Washington Post)

The idea of gifted education has long been controversial. In the early 20th century, studies of giftedness “evolved from research on mental inheritance” and “subnormal children,” according to a history of the field on the website of the National Association for Gifted Children, a Washington organization made up of educators, academics and parents that advocates for gifted education.

The Cold War — and in particular the launch of Sputnik in the late 1950s — lent a sense of geopolitical urgency to identifying little brainiacs. The federal government in the early 1970s “brought the plight of gifted school children back into the spotlight,” the association’s history says. The definition of giftedness expanded over the years, along with programming options. But cries of racial and economic exclusion have dogged the endeavor. (Whites and Asians tend to be overrepresented in gifted and talented programs, federal data show.)

The criteria are not consistent, say critics such as consultant Andrew Rotherham, who has argued that the value of the gifted label has more to do with scarcity.

Yet such criticisms have failed to sway parents and educators who insist that without such programs, schools not only shortchange exceptionally bright kids, but can discourage them.

During her 15 years teaching in Fairfax County public schools, Carole Nysmith says she noticed a shortfall in challenging classes for children with advanced intellectual abilities, so she came up with a strategy to teach kids “turned off by education” because they were being taught things they already knew. She later decided to take her methods private and in 1983, after pulling together money from a family inheritance, the sale of a beach house and a line of credit, she started the Nysmith School for the Gifted in the old Reston Visitors Center. Focused on accelerated science and technology programs in small classes with a 9 to 1 student-teacher ratio, the school opened with more than 50 kids.

Today, Nysmith’s annual tuition ranges from $23,000 for full-day preschool to $33,880 by eighth grade. A quarter to a third of families receive financial assistance, up to half the annual tuition.

“We’ve got a whole spectrum of economic backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds. As you watch the children in the halls, we’re a very diverse community,” Ken Nysmith says.

A more specific breakdown is not available, despite frequent requests by prospective parents, says admissions director Marian White.

“People will call and say, what percentage do you have of African American or whatever, and they’ll go down the list. Well, we don’t break it down that way,” she says, although the school says its students represent 55 countries and the U.S. military. “It doesn’t matter male or female, it doesn’t matter what ethnicity. It doesn’t matter to us, so we don’t even track it. Because what matters is if this program and that child are a really good fit.”

Carole Nysmith is greeted by students as they arrive, as headmaster Ken Nysmith looks on. Carole Nysmith encourages all students to greet her in the morning with eye contact. (Photo by Lexey Swall/GRAIN for The Washington Post)

Parents have been known to quit their jobs, sell their homes, just to move to the area and send their kids to Nysmith. They come, Ken Nysmith says, for the school’s “common sense” approach to teaching: “We teach the children what they’re ready to learn. When people ask, What is our goal? Is it test scores, is it a certain number of kids getting into TJ — no. It’s really, Do the children love to learn?”

Cindy Wimmer, a McLean, Va., jewelry designer, says that philosophy is what led her and her husband to send all four of their children to Nysmith: Gabriel and Collin, who graduated and now attend public schools, and Chandler and Nathaniel, who are still at Nysmith.

The three younger boys are with her as she slogs through rush-hour traffic on a brisk November afternoon. She pulls her SUV into the parking lot of the Fencing Sports Academy in Fairfax, and the boys jump out while their Scottie puppy, McGregor, settles down in the back seat for a quiet snooze. Once inside the fencing club, the boys go through a warm-up routine of quick turns and lunges to prepare for the advance, retreat and balance drills. Then they strap on their white jackets and protective masks.

Wimmer keeps an eye out for her husband, Randy, who is on his way from the federal government contracting company he owns in Tysons Corner. When he turns up, he explains private school had not been a given. The 47-year-old Navy veteran was one of seven kids in a blue-collar family in southwestern Virginia and the first to graduate from college.

“I was not a good student,” he says. So he was blindsided by firstborn Gabriel’s high IQ test scores. After watching the boy tear through primary-level books in kindergarten, Randy Wimmer remembers thinking, “Wow, where did that come from?”

Gabriel, now 15, has a keen interest in cybersecurity defense strategies. He attends Thomas Jefferson, where the largest group of Nysmith graduates go each year. (About 2,800 kids applied to join the class of 2019 at TJ; just under 500 were accepted.) His younger brothers are also precocious but in different ways.

Thirteen-year-old Collin is an outgoing creative writer who makesfanciful origami shapes with his eyes shut. He is now in an advanced placement program at Longfellow Middle School, his neighborhood school. As the foils clash in the background at the fencing club, Collin talks about how he likes to “do stuff that involves hand-to-eye coordination, like tying Celtic knots or globe knots or monkey fists.”

Redheaded Chandler, 11, is entrepreneurial like his dad. In September he placed second in a toy competition held by a local museum and Hexbugs with his model toy,a device named Maneuver. “It was a game of checkers on a Rubik’s Cubesort of thing, three-dimensional,” says the sixth-grader. “Hexbugs may actually market it, but if they don’t there are a lot of Kickstarter ideas, so I’d like to do one of those.”

Nathaniel, the youngest, is a builder. His father claims he could assemble complex Lego structures before he could walk. “It’s so easy,” the first-grader says, “that I decided to make a castle bigger than my head. Much bigger.”

He jumps on his brother Collin’s back and tosses an arm around Chandler. All three of them are shiny with sweat.

Randy and Cindy Wimmer don’t see themselves as hard-driving, Type A parents, nor do they come off that way. Cindy says her family’s experience at Nysmith shows there’s no one-size-fits-all education. Asked about the hefty price tag for private school for four kids on a springboard to even more expensive colleges, Randy pauses a moment to exhale.

“I know exactly what I’m going to be doing the day I die — still paying for college loans,” he says, only half joking. “But my wife and I decided, we’re blessed with these kids, we have the means, let’s invest it in their education.”

Students in a sixth-grade language arts class act out Shakerspeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (Photo by Lexey Swall/GRAIN for The Washington Post)

“Once more unto the breach!”

It’s 10:15 on a Wednesday morning and language arts teacher Philip Stephens is taking his students through Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” When he challenges his seventh-grade students to sum up the play in 20 seconds, hands shoot up.

“So there’s this English king guy, Henry … and the French dauphin thinks Henry’s a joke, so Henry declares war on France.”

“Good! And what is a breach?” Stephens asks.

“A gap in a wall,” says a previously silent boy, tugging at the pulp of the tangerine splayed out on his desk.

“Awesome,” says Stephens.

In his class, as with most classes at Nysmith, there may be students learning at different grade levels. Two teachers in every classroom allow for such “diversification,” a term Nysmith defines as teaching to four grade levels within a class for accelerated instruction in reading, math, science, logic and foreign languages. In other words, if a third-grader is ready for fifth-grade work, she gets to work at that level without leaving her peers.

To determine whether a kid is ready for accelerated learning, White says, intellectual assessments are given in first grade.

“Because we diversify, sometimes parents get caught up in the idea that that’s the goal and they push their children,” Ken Nysmith says, “whereas we believe in nurturing them. We nurture them at the next level if we think they are going to be successful, but when a child feels pressure, it’s counterproductive. That’s sometimes the hardest part of my job, saying to a parent, ‘You know, your child’s just not ready for it.’ ”

For a school that prides itself on preparing kids to thrive in intensely competitive environments, it may seem odd for the headmaster to sound so allergic to academic pressure. But it’s a key tenet of the school’s approach. In a post about report cards on the school’s website, he pleads with parents “not to stress to their child that they must make straight A’s.” “The psychological damage that can be done to young children is profound,” he writes. “Is that grade worth having your child hate the subject or you, or hate themselves, for the rest of their lives?”

“We grade on effort,” Nysmith says. “Our view is that grades are motivational; they are a tool to inspire children to do their best; they are not a goal.”

Parents are not the source of pressure all of the time, says 2003 Nysmith alum Jonathan Chang, who recalls there were always kids who felt a need to excel, including himself.

“My brother is profoundly autistic and can’t speak, and I just put a lot of that pressure on myself to not give my parents something else to worry about,” says the 27-year-old. “I never really rebelled in any terrible way. I spiked my hair? That was pretty much as far as it went.” But he credits the school’s supportive, close-knit environment for opening up a naturally shy kid and giving him the confidence to veer from his natural strengths in science and math. After taking a class with Stephens, he fell in love with literature and now teaches English at a private high school in Oakton, Va.

“There are those days, of course, where I think it would’ve been so much fun to have become a software developer or an engineer of some kind,” Chang says. “But I don’t regret having become a teacher, because there’s something very different about affecting a young person’s life the way Mr. Stephens affected mine. I guess that’s what nine years of Nysmith will do to you.”

Eighth-graders Megan Wenig, from left, Grace Morgan, Gabrielle Byas, Anna Blasdell, Kirthi Kumar, Neha Bhat and Ethan Bean spend lunch together in the sunny lounge in the Upper School, a privileged spot, reserved for eighth-graders to relax and hangout. (Photo by Lexey Swall/GRAIN for The Washington Post)

The sunny lounge in the Upper School is a privileged spot reserved for eighth-graders to relax and hang out. Two weeks before winter break, seven of them gather during lunch.

“It kind of makes your last year special,” says Ethan Bean, leaning back on a comfortable sofa.

Nysmith ends at eighth grade because, as Carole and Ken Nysmith make plain, they are content doing what they do best. But for the kids, leaving Nysmith will mean finding new friends and new routines, and forming fresh identities. Scary stuff.

For some, it will also be their first brush with the kind of social hierarchies and snarkiness that define school for many of their peers.

“You might be a geek or really into computers, or you might be someone who’s really into the arts, but here you’re never termed as a geek or as an artsy person,” says Kirthi Kumar, an eighth-grader and aspiring biomedical engineer. “There are no cliques. At Nysmith, like, we’re all one mold.”

“I can’t tell you how many hundreds, maybe thousands, of families come to visit us, walk through the door expecting a bunch of little nerds,” Ken Nysmith says. “Well, what’s a nerd? A child who loves math, a child who loves science, a child who’s socially awkward? Well, why are they socially awkward? Because they don’t have that community of shared interests. They don’t understand why other kids in the class don’t want to talk about black holes or space and just want to talk about what other kids want to talk about. I think that’s where the sense of community here becomes absolutely critical. Certainly the more exposure you have to others like you, the more you feel normal, like you belong.”

The school’s thinking seems to be that this kind of safe haven ultimately boosts EQ, or emotional intelligence. The goal of the school’s character-education curriculum is to help students embrace and celebrate the sensitive, exceptional student while honing the social and emotional skills needed to survive high school without getting a rap as an annoying know-it-all.

Nysmith says these skills are essential. “We all know very bright, intelligent people who cannot communicate their ideas, who cannot share their emotions,” he says. “It does make for a difficult life if you cannot communicate effectively.”

For Randy Wimmer, these soft skills might be more important than a perfect grade-point average. “I’m very proud of my children, but they’re not walking Einsteins,” he says. “If a person is gifted in one area, it’s probably at the expense of something else. … Maybe my kids don’t focus on sports that much, and they’re not gonna be the next NBA or NFL stars. I’m fine with that, too. But if there is a difference, it’s when my kids find that one thing they’re really passionate about … then they really invest their time and energy into it.

“At the end of the day,” he says, “I want to make sure my kids are good people. And happy. It all comes down to looking in the mirror and being happy in their own skin.”

Glen Finland is a writer in McLean, Va., and author of “Next Stop: A Son With Autism Grows Up.” To comment on this story, email wpmagazine@ washpost.com or visit washingtonpost.com/magazine.

Click here to see The Washingtion Post article

This Saturday, the 6th Grade Nysmith School Odyssey of the Mind Team, comprised of Ashley Nguyen, Christian Schipma, Emma Jing, Sean Gillen, Chandler Wimmer, and Spencer Huang, represented the Nysmith School with pride.  Their creative solution and performance resulted in the First Place title in the Odyssey of the Mind Regional Competition.

The team coached by Scott Schipma and Jackie Becker competed in the Division II Technical Problem entitled, “Something Fishy.” The team wowed the crowd with their hand created complicated technical devices that (1) moved 3 highly creative expected, unexpected, and new discovery “catches,” and (2) captured the moving catches from a variety of distances.  Their long term problem solution to this technical problem took place on a set resembling the surface of Mars.

The team will advance to the Odyssey of the Mind State Competition next month!

Congrats to our creative problem solvers!

These Virginia students love reading, long to travel and have strong feelings about cake.

By Christina Barron March 13

Ilene Kaufman and Brandi Sagilir’s second-grade language arts class at Nysmith School for the Gifted in Herndon, Virginia. (Nysmith School for the Gifted)

Ilene Kaufman and Brandi Sagilir’s second-grade language arts class at Nysmith School for the Gifted in Herndon, Virginia, is the March Class of KidsPost. Kaufman and Sagilir’s 15 students have a wide range of interests. They enjoy reading fantasy and mystery books, playing soccer, and exploring Web sites with math games.

We publish a Class of KidsPost each month of the school year. If you would like your class considered, ask your teacher to download our questionnaire at wapo.st/classofkidspost2015, fill it out and send it, along with a class picture, to kidspost@­washpost.­com. If your class is chosen, we’ll send a KidsPost Chesapeake Bay poster, a book and KidsPost goodies.

Favorite author and favorite book: When it comes to reading, these second-graders favored mystery and fantasy books, but they couldn’t pick just one author. Ron Roy and his “A to Z Mysteries” series and J.K. Rowling and the “Harry Potter” books each received two votes. Other fantasy titles included Lloyd Alexander’s “Time Cat” and Suzanne ­Collins’s “Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane.” The kids also enjoy funny books, picture books, sports books and realistic fiction.

Favorite TV show: “The 7D,” a Disney Channel cartoon based on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” shared first place with “Alvin and the Chipmunks” on Nickelodeon. Other favorites included comedies “Liv and Maddie” and “A.N.T. Farm” and baseball highlights show “Quick Pitch.”

If you could go on a trip anywhere, where would you go? These students better have their passports, because many are hoping to travel overseas. Australia received two votes followed by a long list of foreign destinations, including Shanghai, Egypt, Paris and Korea.

Favorite game or sport: Soccer netted nearly one-third of the votes in this category. Gymnastics and Monopoly tied for second. The most unusual picks: fencing and charades.

Person, living or dead, you admire most: Students often pick parents as most admired, but in this class, the top vote-getter was “brother.” One student noted that “he always cheers me up.”

Favorite birthday food: We could say that cake topped the list, but the kids had specific flavors in mind: lava cake, tiramisu and a giant chocolate cupcake with pink frosting. Other requests included chocolate mousse, berries and a three-foot piece of bacon.

Favorite website: Fun 4 the Brain, a site featuring math games, finished first with 20 percent of the votes. But an equal percentage of kids wrote that their favorite website was . . . nothing. They just didn’t spend much time online. Second place went to the video site YouTube.

Favorite club or hobby: There was a three-way tie for first in this category: math, art and computers. Other answers were Junior Architect, Study Buddies and having sleepovers.

What do you want to be when you grow up? Scientist was the top career choice, with several specialties mentioned (chemist, physicist, and plants and animals). Doctor received two votes. Other interesting future jobs: art store owner, horseback rider, business developer and comedian.

What is the biggest problem in the world today, and what can kids do to help solve it? Nearly half the class picked pollution as their top concern. Some were especially worried about the oceans and lakes. They advised other kids to recycle and “stop dropping things in the oceans.”

Click HERE to see the KidsPost article.

By Dennis Foley
March 12, 2016

Kids in Northern Virginia are getting a chance to learn more about opportunities in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and show off what they have learned already.

HERNDON, Va. — Kids in Northern Virginia are getting a chance to learn more about opportunities in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and show off what they have learned already.

The STEM Symposium at the Nysmith School in Herndon offered children hands-on opportunities to apply STEM topics to real world applications.

Some students got some seat time with a computer joystick to take command of a virtual fighter jet. Others got crafty.

Students in one classroom were building catapults capable of tossing Ping-Pong balls and marshmallows.

There were also exhibitors to assist students interested in pursuing a STEM career.

Sajni Bederey is with STEM All-Stars, which tries to help girls pursue a career in the sciences field. The biggest problem she sees is perception and stereotyping.

“All they can picture of a programmer is a nerd typing away on his computer,” Bederey said.

But she says girls need to know that it is OK to play with Legos instead of a Barbie doll when they are young.

The exhibition also allowed students to showcase their work in a science fair.

Fifth grader Michael Conner looked at what type of water was best at growing a healthy plant: comparing tap water, carbonated water, San Pellegrino sparkling mineral water and distilled water.

The best?

“I would say Pellegrino,” Conner found, if you wanted the most bountiful, bushy plant.

The plant fed with carbonated water grew the tallest.

But this student says if you aren’t willing to splurge on some pricier water, don’t put that garden hose away just yet.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a bad option,” the fifth grader said about tap water.

“I would actually say it’s kind of good but also not so bad. I would say if you didn’t have carbonated or Pellegrino, tap would be the next-best option.”

Just down the hallway, fourth grader Harshal Lobana had her own mini fan operating just on water.

“This is my thermal electric generator,” Lobana showcased at her display.

Two blue buckets, one filled with hot water and the other with icy cold water, sat on the table with metal connecting the two and wires feeding out to a small fan.

“It generates electricity using the metal as a conductor and makes the fan work,” Lobana said.

Lobana wasn’t sure if it could generate enough power to charge a phone, in case desperate times called for desperate measures, but she says it wouldn’t be unreasonable.

Click HERE to read the article.

Third Annual STEM Symposium draws a crowd at the Nysmith School.

Aaron Joy, a fifth-grader at the Nysmith School, explains his science fair project on bio-plastics to U.S. Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-11), who was also an event speaker. During his remarks, Connolly praised Fairfax County in particular for its investment in education, but cautioned that “other countries have caught up to us, we need to continue and advance our investment in STEM, in research and development and in improving our infrastructure.” Photo by Andrea Worker.

By Andrea Worker

“We need people in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields today, tomorrow and as far as we can envision.”

That quote came from speaker Eric Schierling as he addressed the crowd packed into the gym at the Nysmith School for the Gifted in Herndon during one of four presentations offered at the Third Annual STEM Symposium. Schierling, a director with Vencore, Inc.’s Space Group and a former Naval Top Gun Pilot, was joined throughout the day-long event by a plenitude of accomplished and engaging speakers, from former astronauts to high school and college students, a U.S. Congressman, leaders from STEM-related businesses and agencies, and school principals and headmasters. Regardless of what position each speaker held, what point in their careers at which they had arrived, or whether they worked for the government, the private sector, a nonprofit, or had yet to complete their studies and enter the workforce, their remarks all contained an echo of Schierling’s statement. Somewhere in each speaker’s address there was a cautionary note that STEM-proficient people are not only in high demand, but in critically short supply. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology’s (TJHS) principal Dr. Evan Glazer insisted that “we need to keep searching for ways to encourage our STEM-curious young people.” Exposure, encouragement, opportunities and resources are key to developing the “STEM-inclined.” Glazer’s presentation included excerpts and numerous slides that highlighted the STEM fields with the most projected growth for the near future, as well as practical advice for parents and teachers on how to encourage STEM interest, and where to look for support and resources.

JD Kathuria, founder and president of WashingtonExec, an online media, membership and events company in D.C, is a staunch supporter of STEM education. He is so convinced that investment in STEM education is invaluable, that he launched the Symposium in 2014 to bring together the best, the brightest and the most involved to elevate STEM education to the foreground of the region’s concerns.

IN THIS THIRD, and ever-growing edition of the event attended by some 2500 people, Kathuria and the WashingtonExec gathered sponsors like Aerospace, Vencore and Siemens to achieve the mission of “bringing industry and students together.” In addition to the speakers’ sessions, attendees were treated to more than forty exhibitors filling the hallways and classrooms of Nysmith. Some of the exhibitors, like George Mason University and Sweet Briar College, Nysmith and TJHSST represented formal educational opportunities. Others, like Fairfax Collegiate, Microsoft in Education, Patriots Technology Training Center and STEAMtrix, LLC Learning Program offered outside-the-school term STEM activities, workshops and camps.

Nonprofits, outreach groups and organizations run by kids themselves were also on hand. Robotics for Youth, Inc., which occupied a double booth, was manned by some 20 student volunteers, and still had a crowd three-deep waiting to try their hands at operating some of the robots the group had built. The nonprofit was formed just last year by three teenagers – Bharath Maniraj from Fairfax High School, Rishabh Venketesh from TJHSST, and Pranav Sukumaran from River Bend Middle School. “The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be a million computing job openings by 2024,” is one reason why co-founder Maniraj took his interest in the field to the outreach level. “We are doing our best to increase awareness among school-aged kids.” The Robotics for Youth gang also serve as mentors for Lego League competition participants.

The Children’s Science Center was another exhibitor that attracted significant attention, with hands-on activities and experiments available for youngsters of different ages and abilities – with a few adults who just couldn’t resist mixed in. The Center currently operates at Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax but is in the planning stage to develop a full-scale, state-of-the art, STEM-centered interactive museum at the Nokes Boulevard exit off of Route 28 in the Dulles area.

MENTORING GROUPS were also well represented. LaShaunda Ford who works at Dell, Lauren Medley from Booz Allen Hamilton, and Elizabeth Goodson with Lightower Fiber Networks were pleased to be able to reach so many young women at one venue as they offered information about the “Girls in Technology” mentoring program they belong to.

Several local youth were given the opportunity to showcase their competition-bound Science Fair projects and made admirably poised presentations explaining their work from drawing board to finished product, or from hypothesis to practice. Aaron Joy, a fifth grader at Nysmith, looked calm and comfortable as he discussed his work with U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-11) who toured the exhibits, demonstrations and projects after his speaking duties at the symposium were completed earlier in the day.

The organizers of the STEM Symposium, mindful of the ages and activity levels of many in their audience, also provided some outdoor adventures, including the opportunity to race against President Thomas Jefferson himself – at least as personified by the Washington Nationals baseball team’s official presidential mascot. There were also flight simulators courtesy of sponsor Vencore, drone displays and “connected” cars with Internet access and other high-tech accessories.

The STEM symposium brochure handed out upon check in to the event described the mission of the organizers to be joining “a community of teachers, mentors, parents and local leaders to nurture a child’s curiosity in the STEM fields. Linking science and mathematics taught in the classroom to impactful careers is an ongoing national challenge. Bottom Line: The opportunities for students who are STEM-proficient are endless.” More information, resources, and a Parent-STEM action plan are available at www.stemsyposium.com.

Click HERE to read the article.

A team representing Nysmith School achieved Highest Honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. The fourth grade team scored an impressive 197 points out of a possible 200 in the second of three meets this year, placing first in the nation.

Competing in the very difficult Gold Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, fourth graders Cameron Ake, Ella Greene, Joseph Grossman, Aanya Kolli, Hanna Park, Claire Tarallo and Zani Xu each earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 32 fourth graders achieved this result. Other students from Nysmith School who achieved outstanding results in the meet include fourth graders Sahithi Atluri, Kinnari Chaubal, Samuel Cottrell, Jayden Johnson, Ryan Kim, Ava Lawless, Kelvin Nguyen, Amal Wooldridge and Brian Zhou. The students were coached in preparation for the WordMasters Challenge™ by Laura Buch and Aisha Enayatulla.

The WordMasters Challenge™ is an exercise in critical thinking that first encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words (considerably harder than grade level), and then challenges them to use those words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships. Working to solve the analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. Although most vocabulary enrichment and analogy-solving programs are designed for use by high school students, WordMasters Challenge™ materials have been specifically created for younger students in grades three through eight. They are particularly well suited for children who are motivated by the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.

The WordMasters Challenge™ program is administered by a company based in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is dedicated to inspiring high achievement in American schools.

Further information can be found by clicking here

On March 19th, the Nysmith School Debate Team competed at the DCUDL Two Rivers Public Forum Debate Tournament and were very successful! Two teams made it to the final four and competed in the final rounds. The topic was: The United States should withdraw its military presence from Okinawa. Congratulations to Vikram B and Alex M for winning first place team and 3rd and 1st speaker award as well as Justin W and Bhavjeet for placing 4th! These two teams will advance to nationals public forum competition in Salt Lake City, UT this June! Also a big congratulations to Ben, Yash, and Tarina for making it to the parliamentary debate nationals competition in New Jersey this April!!!

We are so excited to share the news that Nysmith has been awarded the “Best Private Elementary School” from PoshSeven Magazine in their POSH SEVEN BEST OF KIDS 2016 WINNERS Survey.

BEST PRIVATE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
NYSMITH SCHOOL FOR THE GIFTED
13625 EDS Drive, Herndon, VA 20171
(703) 435-7711
http://www.nysmith.com

The students and teachers at Nysmith School for the Gifted find a true joy in learning and are involved in a variety of engaging educational activities. From preschool to eighth grade, your child will receive a quality education that takes a truly hands-on approach that will prepare them for future academic careers. From grammar, reading, and creative writing to computer programming, science labs, and drama, Nysmith School focuses on learning in a variety of academic and enrichment capacities.

Ted on Facebook praises Nysmith School for the Gifted: “Absolutely the top choice and experience for differentiated, advanced learners, STEM preparation, and readiness for the diversity and rigors of continued advanced education. Very small, focused classes with exceptional teaching staff and extremely responsive administration. Heads and shoulders above any other K-8 program, public or private, in the entire Northern Virginia area, particularly Western Fairfax/Eastern Loudoun (i.e., the Dulles area).”

For more information click HERE.

Congratulations to Vance and Anand!

Vance and Anand were two of only 30 students in Virginia, from an original pool of 2874, who qualified to participate in the You Be The Chemist Virginia State Challenge™.  They were among the six Fairfax/Arlington Local Challenge Finalists. Vance and Anand represented Nysmith School proudly, demonstrating good sportsmanship throughout the State Challenge. We are excited to inform you that Vance was a semi-finalist in the Challenge, finishing in fourth place.  Congratulations boys!

Congratulations Nysmith Sixth Grade Odyssey of the Mind Team!  They are Virginia State Champions  and Advance to World Finals in Ames, Iowa!

On Saturday April 16th, the 6th Grade Odyssey of the Mind team (the Nysmith Brainy Bunch) traveled to Newport News, Virginia to compete in the Virginia State Odyssey of the Mind Competition.

This team comprised of Ashley Nguyen, Christian Schipma, Sean Gillan, Emma Jing, Spencer Huang, and Chandler Wimmer, have been working together for countless hours over the past 7 months creating six creative technical devices, a spectacular set on the surface of Mars, and a presentation meeting all of the problem 2 technical problem specifications. Three of the creative devices created movement of specified catch items, and 3 of the “catching devices” were used to catch the moving items from a variety of distances.

The team created their devices, set, and costumes primarily from trash and recycled items that were collected from many Nysmith families friends and neighbors. These items were creatively repurposed into devices, backdrops, costumes, and other required items.

The team wowed the crowd and the judges in both their long term presentation, and their creative solution to the spontaneous portion of the competition. The team will advance to the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals in May at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.

Odyssey of the Mind is a creative problem solving competition requiring teamwork, creativity, technical building/engineering skills, and presentation skills. Team members apply their creativity to solve problems that range from building mechanical devices to presenting their own interpretation of literary classics. Students bring their solutions to competition on the local, state, and World level. Thousands of teams from throughout the U.S. and from about 25 other countries, to include China, Singapore, Poland, India, Germany, & Korea, participate in the competition.

This past weekend Ben Silverman, Tarina Ahuja, and Yash Somaiya competed in the ESU MSPDP National Tournament in Allentown, NJ! The topics were:

The US should establish a no-fly zone in Syria.
The US should have compulsory voting in general elections.
Schools should require cameras in classrooms.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court career did more good than harm.
Scientists should use cloning technology to resurrect animals made extinct by humans.
The US should adopt the metric system.

A big congratulations to team SAS as they brought home Top School in the Nation and Top School for the DC League!!