Well, day 4 started out with the students working on a survival scenario brain teaser. Basically the classic: If you were stranded what items would you want with you? It was a good starting point for the day as students had to work in teams and come to conclusions based on logical arguments. I don't know why anyone did not pick the pruning shears to take with them?
HMMMM???
The next activity was a simple, but powerful one: How much data is enough data? Students were given cups of five puzzle pieces and they had to guess what the overall puzzle image was from passing their cups around. With many good guesses, no one really was able to get what the puzzle was with out some key pieces I later revealed. Students really saw that they need a lot of data to really come to a conclusion and sometimes with out some key pieces it may hard to reach a logical explanation. Like I said before, simple BUT powerful. :-)
What is it?????
After that, we had a discussion about academics at the high school and compared it to middle school. I then had students analyze some class data using real number from my past classes. They were told to construct box and whiskers plots on the minis and they had no problems at all recalling what we did yesterday. So it was nice, seeing that they had learned and mastered a skill with the computer.
At that point it was lunch and we hiked up to the baseball field (the highest point on the school grounds) for a picnic. It really gives a nice view of the Mountain, the windmills, and center of Princeton. The campers then had discussions with the CITs about the projects and what pitfalls they might run into. Then I took them for a walk on the cross country trails and showed them the rest of the athletic fields and cooled them off with freeze pops when we got back to the school.
I really wish I had brought some of those things from the survival activity with us!
During our walk the CITs put together one of the most useful activities for the campers: the school wide scavenger hunt. The campers worked in random groups and solved clues to the room numbers of somewhere in the school. The CITs worked really hard on this great activity to give the campers more familiarity with the building and show them that even thought the building is large in square footage it is not that hard to get around and navigate.
Echo-Echo-Echo-Echo
Finally we ended the day with my favorite activity: What's it used for? I put out a bunch of random science equipment and the students had to guess their uses.
After many good and funny guesses, I then went around and explained the uses of each object. This always ends in a BANG! (Sorry that the video is sideways, I will figure out how to change it later.)
No comments:
Post a Comment