So day one started out great. Campers got their own project notebooks and copies of the project manual. DO NOT LOSE THE PROJECT MANUAL! It is really the be-all/end-all guide as to how to do a science project. Students also got their first notification that no late projects will be accepted (its due April 11th, 2011). Alright enough heavy stuff, lets get into the fun of SPeC Camp! After a round of introductions, we got to know each other with a few simple challenges/games.
The first was a simple activity to see who could make the longest thread out of 3 cotton balls.
And the winners are...
Second Place
First Place!!!!!
Style Points!
The next activity was the first of our engineering challenges where the campers had to construct the longest bridge out of 3 pieces of spaghetti and one 3 x 5 notecard.
The longest (not free standing)
After lunch, we did our last of the simple activities where the students saw how many drops of water they could put on a penny without it overflowing.
Suface tension at its finest!
Patience and determination.
Now as simple as this activity seems, we got some data quickly. This then led to a discussion of consistency in procedure and technique. Its really easy to have slight changes in procedure really affect the data you get. We also got to talk about variance between trials. We ended the day with the new Dell Minis and an intro to LoggerPro.
We first talked about the LoggerPro program and how useful it is collecting data. By the time camp ends all students will get a copy to install on their home computer.
Safety First when handling chemicals!
After the intro we did a simple experiment adding salt to an ice water bath to see what happens the to the temperature of the mixture. Some students were surprised and everyone got to become more familiar with how to take data using LoggerPro.
We let the students develop their own ideas as to how to SHOW how the temperature changes after addition of salt. This led to a discussion of how data collection takes some trial and error and their first procedure will always need some fine tuning. This is all part of the process and sometimes you will do several rounds of tweaking an experiment to get a solid procedure down.
Also we talked about how sometimes what you expect to happen and what actually happens are two different things. That's OK, sometimes 50 + 50 does not equal 100!
Tiring first day, but I can't wait for Tuesday!
No comments:
Post a Comment