Members of the UA helped celebrate Global Youth Service Day in Tucson at the fifth annual Pennington Street Block Party Friday evening.
The block party, put on by City High School located downtown, included City High School students as well as staff and various organizations “that offer young people many ways to make an impact on their world,” according to the event’s press release.
“Global Youth Service Day is a three day event … that is an international holiday that is kind of celebrating and putting the focus on all of the great work youth do for our communities worldwide,” said Carrie Brennan, the Pennington Street Block Party coordinator and City High executive director.
The UA’s School of Government and Public Policy, which has a location in downtown Tucson, had a booth for the Sustainable City Project, which involves the UA College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for the Environment. The UA School of Government and Public Policy used the event to connect with the neighborhood, according to Pamela Adams, a graduate programs manager for the school.
The Sustainable City Project aims to teach “the next generation of students to become more sustainable” as well as try to get the students to “think critically on their own,” said Samuel Paz, a member of the Sustainable City Project and a planning graduate student at the UA College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture.
The “Mathematics Bus,” a traveling physics demonstration, created by The Physics Factory which is instructed by UA professors, encourages attendees to paint their ideas of what they think math and science is on the outside of the bus, according to Bruce Bayly, UA associate mathematics professor and “Mathematics Bus” instructor. The Physics Factory has been in operation since 2003, Bayly added.
“What we are encouraging people to do is to actually to draw pictures or images or graphics that they think of as evocative of mathematics,” Bayly said. “We have some wave patterns here. We have some shapes — triangles, pentagons. There is a nautilus down there at the far end because sea creatures, they all have mathematical structure.”
All students and faculty from City High School are involved with putting together the block party and Friday’s block party “was the best one of the five,” according to Brennan.
“Personally I enjoy big festivals and fairs and hanging out with friends,” said James Ianni, a freshman at City High School who helped set up this year’s block party, “From what I can tell this [the Pennington Street Block Party] is one of the two, three big high-points of the year, up with prom and graduation.”
