HPA students present work at Apple Headquarters

Bill Wiecking, Hawaii Preparatory Academy Upper School science teacher and director of the HPA Energy Lab, and seven Upper School students — Jessica Ainslie, Luigi Balbo Bertone Di Sambuy, Erina Baudat, Bo Bleckel, Leila Morrison, Kenji Stinson and Hannah Twigg-Smith — traveled to California during spring break to present their work at two national conferences, Macworld/iWorld 2014 in San Francisco and the Green Schools National Conference in Sacramento.

Students presented their work at Apple Headquarters in Cupertino.

Ainslie, Baudat, and Morrison presented their “Campus Sustainability” project March 28 at the Green Schools National Conference. The students’ AP Environmental Science project included reviewing sustainable initiatives that can be integrated at the school.

Balbo Bertone Di Sambuy, Baudat, Bleckel, Morrison, Stinson and Twigg-Smith presented their work March 29 at Macworld/iWorld’s Future Tech session.

Future Tech, a new strand at the conference, is dedicated to innovative solutions and projects created by high school students. HPA’s students — the first high school students to present at Future Tech — focused on diverse topics, including MIDI-brain interfaces (Balbo Bertone Di Sambuy), aging patient music therapy with EEG (Baudat), high dynamic range (HDR) photography using Phantom drones and virtual reality tools (Bleckel), creating a detailed energy monitoring and analysis toolset for the HPA campus using one-minute interval data from sensors linked to the school’s Energy Lab telemetry system (Morrison), Tetris and your brain (Stinson), and sleep apnea studies (Twigg-Smith).

The Energy Lab at Hawaii Preparatory Academy recently was recognized as an Apple Distinguished Program for 2013-2015 and the HPA team was invited to present their projects at Apple Headquarters in Cupertino.

Students presented there March 28.