"Apples Up" Music Video by MS English Teacher Ethan Rossiter

When Middle School English teacher Ethan Rossiter heard the phrase, "Apples Up," at a faculty meeting earlier this year,  he was inspired. Mr Rossiter, who is also a children's music practitioner, began marinating the concept for musical treatment. Saying "Apples Up" is a signal used by teachers to re-focus students' attention during lessons when laptops are in use. When students close the lids of their MacBooks, the Apple logo on the lid is pointed up towards the sky. (The same logic applies to phones; putting the phone down on the table with the Apple logo up means that the screen is down, so it is no longer in use.) "I thought it was a super-catchy phrase," Rossiter says. "That's when the idea for a song started."

"I had never made a music video before, and it was definitely envisioned as just a fun, creative project," Rossiter says. "But I guess my hope is that schools and families could use the song and video as an entry point into a discussion about technology."

After an afternoon of filming and many hours of editing, the final result was a fun, extremely catchy, and thought-provoking pastiche about the intersection of technology and student life.

Although Rossiter wrote and performed most of the music, he leaned on the various talents of BB&N students to bring the video to fruition, including drummer Callie Heppner '27, the daughter of Ethan's MS colleague, Christa Crewdson.

"Aaron Kaufer '17 did all the shooting and editing, and the success of the video was really because of his editing," Rossiter says. "Charlie Heveran '17 and Thomas Mandile '17 were also very involved in the acting—they were in every shoot. And two eighth graders, Katie Gould and Jessie Scheer, choreographed the dance."

LED Circuit Stickers in 2 D Art

In the last couple of years, students in Stephanie Moon’s Drawing and Painting Class art class combine traditional media with Chibitronics. Chibitronics was created by a Ph.D. student named Jie Qi from MIT who combined her passion for craft, art, and engineering and created a DIY manual and kit to that made circuits and LED light accessible to the public.

In class students explored the instantaneous pleasure of designing a circuit and making something light up. Students designed a project to incorporate LED lights within their semester-long drawing and painting exploration. The one requirement was that the drawing had to stand alone--it had to be as visually effective alone as with the circuitry enhancements.