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And we’re off and running for the first week of UK See Blue See STEM Summer Camps 2019! It was a bit crazy with many of the students just finishing on Friday, many of our teachers out because of required work days this week, but we made it all run today with our awesome staff and students! We really appreciate all of your patience today as we checked in over 160 students for this week’s camps.

We have a goal to post a blog post each night this week with some highlights from the day and some conversation starters. [Admittedly, our family obligations can get in the way, so please bear with us!] The conversation starters are meant to help you get over the “What did you learn today?” “Nothin’” or <shrugging the shoulders> we often see with our school-age students. We’ll also post a link to the photos we are taking throughout the week. If at any time you want a photo removed that is of your child, please let us know and we’ll be happy to take it down.

Please make sure and check Twitter throughout the day this week – https://twitter.com/SeeBlueSTEMCamp – we’ll post more pictures and updates throughout the day the rest of the week. No account is needed! We are also on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/seebluestemcamp/) and Facebook.

Today in the Vex Robotics, they dove into building their robots. For most students, this is much more complex as many have not built with Vex before. We liken it to a Kinex set…lots of small pieces, screws, and plates. Some have their bases built and got to start playing around with the remote and seeing how they robots move. They will continue building and exploring tomorrow as they figure out the different ways they can get their robot to move and the different arms they can build.

In the red and blue groups today, they got to experience virtual reality. They learned about what virtual reality is, why it is useful, and how people build VR worlds. Students got to be creative and build their own VR worlds and show them off. Some of them brought them home today 🙂 There were a lot of wows and wonderment today! In robotics, they started out with the We Do 2.0 robots. They got to build right away and start programming to see what they could get their robot to do. For many, it was their first time seeing a robot and programming, so they really enjoyed just exploring today and investigating how to make things work in different ways.

In the yellow and green groups, they explored a variety of engineering fields and did some slinky-math and arduinos. In robotics, students built their robots and got started on talking about some programming. Our robotics instructors have some fun new challenges up their sleeves this week, so we’re excited to see where the students take them!

In their words…

Each day we’ll post some excerpts from the students’ reflections of what they learned each day at the STEM Content session. We don’t correct for spelling or grammar in these 🙂

• I want to make my own VR.
• (I liked) Writing storys together
• I learned that you can make your one (VR) show.
• I learned about and, not, and or circits.
• There are different kinds of gates ind circuits.
• I didn’t know about the pulse with the slinky.

Conversation Starters… 

We know your child is getting to the age where it might be like pulling teeth to get them to talk about their day beyond “It was fine.” “It was fun.” “I didn’t do anything.” So, each day we’ll post some suggested conversation starters centered on camp activities or STEM-related themes.

Vex Robotics

• How is building the Vex robot different than the other robots you’ve built before?
• How far did you get in building your robot today? What was the most fun about it?

Red/Blue Groups

• What was experiencing Virtual Reality like?
• Did you feel like you were in a room or in a different place when you had the goggles on?
• If you could create a VR world, what would it be? Why?
• What did you build with your robot today? What code or program did you write to make it do something?

Yellow/Green

• What are arduinos?
• What was the purpose of pulsing the slinky? What did you find out?
• What are important words in circuits?
• How did robot building go today? What are you excited about getting your robot to do this week?

Photo of the Day…

Each day we’ll post a camp highlight.  Click the picture and it will take you to the weekly photo album. Please note that we try to capture pictures of all the campers, but we cannot guarantee that we will get every single one. We try our very best to though! We leave them unedited, so if you love to edit photos…feel free! If there is a photo you wish to have removed, please email me and we’ll take it down!