Embark on a four-year journey to build skills for life.
Beginning in 9th grade, Bay's academic program features one required class per year that ends in a capstone project, comprising the overall project arc. Throughout this four-year progression, students develop resilience in responding to setbacks and gain the knowledge that there is usually more than one way to solve a problem.
At Bay, we believe in the importance of sustained project work, allowing students to hone their skills in time management, iteration, and learning how to change course when needed. The following courses within our project arc offer a dedicated pathway for students to develop these critical skills across disciplines, preparing them to navigate and thrive in a dynamic world beyond the classroom.
The Creative Process
Required for all 9th graders, this course creates a reliable foundation for problem solving. Using design-thinking principles, students walk through the processes of identifying and researching problems, coming up with solutions, and testing and refining them.
Capstone: Will you make an app to help other new students find their way around campus? Reinterpret a classical piano composition? Try to reinvent the wheel? These are real projects that Bay 9th graders have completed in Creative Process.
Civics
All 10th graders take a semester of Civics in which they learn about the structure of government on the local, state, and national level. Digging into current events and the history of many controversial topics, students explore the role of government in their own lives. Media literacy and the evaluation of credible sources of information are a key component of the course as students are challenged to think of ways they can become well-informed civic actors within society.
Capstone: Working in teams, students spend much of the semester creating a podcast—complete with expert guests—on one of the topics covered during the course.
Biology
Taken in 11th grade, Biology 1A and 1B continues to build skills and scientific literacy as applied to living systems. Topics include ecology, evolution, cellular inheritance and function, and genetics.
Capstone: In the spring semester, students devise a lab-based project that they will conduct the research for and develop into a comprehensive report.
Senior Projects
Serving as the capstone to their high school experience over the course of two semesters during 12th grade, students will propose a project, define their goals, work with a community mentor who provides expertise, and plan and execute the process of creating the final product. Students will encounter obstacles, twists and turns, and probably some failure. But they’ll analyze the problems along the way, change their method (or even their goal), and keep going.
A (very) short list of recent senior projects:
- A system for prison inmates to play chess by mail with members of a well-established San Francisco chess club
- An improved cargo system for bike commuters
- A working prototype of a handheld light that does not require batteries
- A solar-powered battery for small boats