My brother Max and I interviewed Donna DeConcini, who co-founded and currently directs the Southern Arizona Animal Food Bank. It all started when her daughter, Margaux, worked in a feed store and a lot of people came in to see her and find out if they had any food to give away because they couldn’t afford food to feed their pets. The mother and daughter team decided that they should make an organization to help people get free food for their pets.

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 Every year in April is Global Youth Services Day. This is a weekend where kids all over the world are encouraged to do something good for their communities. It doesn’t matter where you live, it is important to be kind and make the world a better place.

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 Recently Young Reporters had the chance to meet Arizona artist Joe Pagac. One of Pagac’s notable artworks is the Whale Mural in central Tucson. Pagac has also painted libraries, building walls, and even Instagram worthy backgrounds that you can pose with! At Kirk-Bear Canyon Library, Pagac painted a mural around the building, and changed styles. Part of it is realistic, and part is painted like how a child would.

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 Have you ever heard of SK Day? SK is an amazing female mathematician named Sonia Kovalevsky. Kovalevsky was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1850 and was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics. The UofA hosted middle and high school students virtually for SK Day this year to encourage young women to study mathematics.

I attended the Zoom meeting about mathematics on SK Day. Team members from the UofA delivered a shirt and supplies to our homes prior to the event!

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 I had a dino-mite experience at Jurassic Quest! It contains one of the largest collections of animatronic dinosaurs in North America. Due to COVID-19, Jurassic Quest offered a drive-thru experience at the Pima County Fairgrounds, which included an incredible audio tour, from the comfort of your own vehicle. Guests could enjoy over 70 life-sized animatronic dinosaurs placed in real-life scenes, with movement and sound. Each dinosaur was identified by name, region where they lived, identifying characteristics and eating habits. There were rows and rows of life-like dinosaurs.

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 The Art of Problem Solving is a new STEM curriculum designed to offer a deeper, more challenging math instruction, helping kids excel at this subject. The program is for kids in grades 5–12. The texts introduce key math concepts and teach kids how to develop new ideas with ways to apply these ideas to challenging problems. Thousands of students are using the program, and many have gone on to win contests such as MATHCOUNTS.

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 Prior to the landing of the NASA Rover Perseverance on Mars, I attended a live NASA webinar, Mars Perseverance: Mission Overview & Countdown to Mars. A team of eight scientists led this webinar for students and teachers.

Justin Simon (a NASA scientist) talked about the planet Mars and about the rover Perseverance. He talked about the weather on Mars and what kind of planet it was. Simon also talked about the certain parts of the 2,260-pound rover and how they worked.

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