HeroCon at Grapevine Middle School By Kate Love, GHS Senior and Zoe Gelher, GHS Junior
As part of the student voice initiative, GCISD will periodically feature news articles written by high school journalism students.
Because Principal Laura Koehler wanted to build the community between Grapevine Middle School’s STEM program and the remainder of the campus, the school commenced its first annual ‘Hero Con’ where students make posters using elements from each of their classes and apply them to everyday heroes.
“We basically kind of took the premise of Comic Con and we came up with Hero Con,” Koehler said. “A lot of the kids have been dressing up and are very excited about it, but our STEM students are the ones that put in the work for the different projects that you’re going to see.”
Most posters are divided into four parts with specific research done in the students’ core classes including Math, Social Studies, Science and ELA (English Language Arts).
“We planned it all out by choosing what careers we were going to use then we had to build up with research and stuff like that,” sixth grader Ellen Kisselburg said. “In science, it was a space career, ELA was a short story, Math an infographic about a career related to math, and in Social Studies it was an Ancient Egyptian Career.”
Students had the opportunity to choose an important American figure, such as someone impactful within their community, who interested them to conduct research on that which is displayed on their posters.
“My poster is about a guy named Red Cloud, he was a Native American leader,” eighth grader Caden Thomas-Harwell said. “I chose him because he was more obscure and thought he should be done.”
Though the posters were created by students involved in STEM, the overall purpose of Hero Con is to unify the campus and build a greater community across the diverse programs the school has to offer.
“Next year we’re hoping to make this a school wide project,” Koehler said. “It is for the kids to build the community between our programs, all of our programs.”
The students enjoyed participating in the event and feel as if it should become an annual tradition that the entire campus can engage in regardless of which program they are apart of.
“It’s really fun collaborating all together as a STEM,” Kisselburg said. “It helps build STEM by letting us interact with each other and the jobs that are around us.”
Koehler said she would love it if Hero Con could spread to other schools in the future.
“We want to make it a really big deal and get everybody excited,” she said. “It would be incredible if they could attribute that to some idea that was sparked on this campus.”