Weekly Hot News Podcast, September 28, 2020

Our Featured Students are the “COVID Corridos!” Students attending the annual Mariachi STEAM Camp hosted by Oregon State University and Intel Corporation became the “COVID Corridos” when their camp went virtual this August. The Mariachi STEAM Summer Camp was an idea generated four years ago by two Intel colleagues. The premise was to take a group of students who are already passionate about music and teach them the connections between music and the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. With HSD faculty and student support and participation, it has been going strong ever since. The camp is typically held at Oregon State University, but had to go virtual this year due to COVID-19. Rather than be deterred by that fact, the camp’s advisors fully embraced it and, along with workshops on songwriting, audio editing software, and the use of social media, included one on how to write a corrido - a traditional Mexican musical storytelling form typically about a tragic event or circumstance. In the corrido workshop, students shared stories about how their families are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. See lyrics from several of the students’ individual projects on the Mariachi STEAM website, and listen to the corrido “Año 2020,” written and performed by the campers, on YouTube.