Despite the pending rain and storms, we had a great start to our 2015 See Blue STEM Camp! We are very excited to welcome 144 campers together again this year! Registration went very well this morning and we really appreciate everyone’s patience in getting all the forms UK requires turned in. You all are awesome!
Just a note about the consent and assent forms that we ask for every year. Our camp is subsidized by an NSF grant that requires research and reporting to the agency. The purpose of the research is to develop a camp model that promotes STEM careers to adolescents and can be replicated. We also look at students attitudes towards STEM and the impact of our activities. We do not collect test scores or anything similar for your students nor do they have to be a Fayette County student to participate. Without this grant and consent and assent to participate the camp simply would not exist. We never report any names or any individual data…it’s always aggregated together! If you want to read our latest published research on the camp, please feel free to download our article and add it to your nightly reading routine 🙂
We will post a blog post each night this week with some highlights from the day and some conversation starters. The conversation starters are meant to help you get over the “What did you learn today?” “Nothin'” or <shrugging the shoulders> we often see at the adolescent age. 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.
Today the blue and red groups (rising 5-6th graders) headed to see Doug Klein, Director of UK’s Project Lead the Way, in the College of Engineering to get some civil engineering hands-on experience. They learned about the design engineering process and then applied it to some civil engineering activities by building dams and levees and testing them out.
The yellow and green groups (rising 7-8th graders) got to experience the wonderful world of engineering today with Dr. Bruce Walcott. They went on a tour of the engineering complex and got to visit several different laboratories and testing rooms. They got to experience the engineering design process by building aluminum foil boats and seeing how many pennies one can hold and they modeled some other engineering activities such as waves with slinkies and magnetic fields, etc.
In robotics, both groups started by reverse engineering their robots. They were given a fully assembled robot and they had to disassemble it and re-assemble. They always love this part, but we’re eager to continue moving them on to basic programming challenges. Many of the groups were able to get to these challenges and had a lot of fun learning and getting to know their robot. We create some new robotics mats this year to work on the basics and creating our own challenges; we hope this will keep the creative juices flowing this week!
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.
- I learned that if you make 90 degree angles for the corners you should hold about 20-25 you pennies.
- We got to contruct boats test them and record how sound waves travel
- I did like the Water Resources Lab. I liked this lab because I find it interesting about how water flows and where it comes from
- Canoes can be made of concreat
- I learned how robotic sensors learn how far away they are from an object.
- Dense things can become bouyant depending on their size and shape.
- The Greek God’s Golden crown didn’t float in the water. (Archimedes Principle)
- I learned what a levee is and how to make one that works.
- How to build a strudy levee with bubble wrap & dirt.
- I learned how to make a bridge out of 4 pieces of paper and 2 blocks.
- What Hydrophilic means
- That aluminum melts ice VERY fast and that it used to be considered very, very fancy.
Conversation Starters… We know that 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.” Each day we’ll post some suggested conversation starters centered on camp activities or STEM-related themes.
Red/Blue Groups (rising 5-6th graders):
- I didn’t realize there was a special process that engineers used…can you tell more about what they do in their process?
- What kind of structure did you build today? Did you have restrictions on how to build it or what it could hold?
- Tell me about how you assembled your robot. Did you follow instructions? Did you just try to figure out what parts went together?
Yellow/Green Groups (rising 7-8th graders):
- What was your favorite part about the engineering tour today?
- What is an anechoic chamber?
- How many pennies did your boat hold? If you could build it again, what would you do differently?
- Is there a particular field of engineering that you think might interest you?
Photo of the Day… Each day we’ll post a collage highlight. Clicking on the picture will also link to all of the pictures taken at camp. 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! Also we are STEM teachers and not full time photographers, so our pictures are not perfect and we leave them unedited, so if you love to edit photos…feel free! (We did not do too well at taking pictures today with the rain and such, but we promise to do better tomorrow!)
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter to get live updates throughout the day! https://twitter.com/SeeBlueSTEMCamp
