Students share EAST Initiative projects with council

Photo by Randy Barrett Joshua Jones (left), Patrick Lanford, Jarrod Westrick and Martha Smith-Gomez presented features of the Gentry School District’s new EAST program to the city council on Feb. 1.
Photo by Randy Barrett Joshua Jones (left), Patrick Lanford, Jarrod Westrick and Martha Smith-Gomez presented features of the Gentry School District’s new EAST program to the city council on Feb. 1.

GENTRY -- Patrick Lanford, Gentry School District EAST Initiative instructor, and middle school students Joshua Jones, Jarrod Westrick and Martha Smith-Gomez presented features of the Gentry School District's new EAST program to the city council on Feb. 1.

The EAST acronym stands for Environmental and Spatial Technologies, and the initiative is designed to give students access to and use of advanced technologies and software for learning purposes as they choose and carry out projects for the benefit of the community.

In a slide presentation, Lanford and students explained how they had used a mapping software program to map the Gentry Cemetery and make it possible for people to search and locate burial plots and sections in the cemetery with a variety of search options, including the name of the deceased, section maps, dates of committal and other variables.

According to Lanford, a link to the project would be provided to the city to make the results of the mapping program available to family members, genealogical researchers and visitors to the cemetery.

Other projects presented included mapping of the school district's bus routes with a variety of search options, including a breakdown by schools; a mapping project to identify areas in the city connected to large feral cat populations; building a three-dimensional tour of the middle school; and a program correlating Arkansas earthquake data with data on the use of fracking to extract natural gas. The results, so far, indicate an overlap of areas with both earthquake activity and fracking but a causal effect connecting earthquakes to fracking could not be determined with any certainty, according to Lanford.

Council members voiced their appreciation to Lanford and the students for their work and their presentation.

"The time in education when a teacher says, 'Get out your textbook and read chapter 35; tomorrow there will be a 15-question test,' are over and past," said Randy Barrett, school district superintendent.

General News on 02/10/2016