It was a day filled with fun, exploration, and experiencing Chinese culture in a field trip students won’t soon forget. Mountain Creek Middle School Chinese Dual Language Immersion (DLI) teacher, Xingran Lu (Michael), recently treated his 9th grade DLI students to a fascinating field trip.

The students experienced Chinese culture firsthand through Kung Fu, Chinese New Year celebrations, a visit to a Chinese grocery store, hands-on learning about mobile payment systems, and enjoying authentic Chinese cuisine at a local restaurant.

The immersive activities brought key AP Chinese Language and Culture themes to life, allowing students to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom to real-world settings. Most importantly, students had an incredible time learning, exploring, and connecting with the culture.

To learn more about DLI or to apply to enroll an upcoming first grader, please visit immersion.jordandistrict.org.

It is a dream come true for some students in the Aerospace Engineering program at the Jordan Academy for Technology and Careers (JATC North). At the urging of their teacher, Amber Staffen, the students entered a NASA TechRise competition this past summer, with proposals for NASA experiments that would potentially be sent into suborbital space. The students were competing against hundreds of others across the nation. And, we are proud to announce, the JATC students were named winners!

A team including Zach Hall, Mason Rice, Canyon Bullock and Blake Bigler will now work with a NASA TechRise team over the next 18 months. NASA will be providing $1500 for supplies so the students can build their experiment, which will then be launched on one of NASA’s High Altitude Balloons in California. The winning student experiment focuses on determining how long data can be stored in space-like conditions, an experiment that has real-world applications.

Teacher Amber Staffon said, “They really reached for the stars (in their proposal),” she said. “If they want to send something to space or something to Mars, they can calculate how long it’s going to last. We will learn how long things can survive and how different conditions will affect them.”

Congratulations to these talented students! We are confident the sky is the limit to your future success.