Day 1: Monday

It was a great first day at STEM InCYte Camp! The weather was perfect with a little rain that hit when we were indoors, which kept us dry as we walked to the different activities. We are thrilled to welcome 35 students this year! Pick up and travel to campus went well with excitement and volume growing as they neared the ISU campus.

Just a note about the consent and assent forms that we ask for every year. Our camp is subsidized by federal grants that require 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. 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 is always aggregated together! You can read about some of our work and our sister camp here.

We will post a blog post each day with highlights from camp 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 will 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.

Morning

Students started their morning in the School of Education were they met camp staff and joined a group identified by colored: red, yellow, green, and blue. Each group includes 8-9 students and a group leader. Groups immediately set out to geocache to explore the Iowa State campus. Geocaching is a global scavenger hunt that allows individuals to engage in map reading and using a compass. The blue and yellow teams tied in our friendly competition. Teams visited the pet snakes in Biology’s Bessey Hall, the original Iowa State Farmhouse, the iconic campanile, the Memorial Union, the Parks Library, Howe Hall for engineering, and Beardshear Hall. The unanimous favorite visiting the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) office in Carver Hall, named for George Washington Carver, where they got a few treats.

After a small snack, groups split up to explore three different STEM activity stations.

• Station #1 had students use cornstarch and water to make a non-Newtonian substance called Oobleck. Newtonian substances are solids, liquids, and gases. Oobleck has some properties of a solid and others of a liquid. The campers get to bring their Oobleck home with them.
• Station #2 allowed students to virtually explore the underwater habitats of sea life using virtual reality glasses. They gathered information on the surroundings needed to build a new aquarium exhibit for a variety of creatures including sharks, fish, and coral.
• Station #3 gave students 3D pens to create glasses, crowns, watermelons, and more out of plastic. We ended up with some crafty creations!

Afternoon

Groups worked with the ISU Chemistry Department to solve a crime through forensic science. Students used pH paper and chromatography to find out who committed the crime. We also investigated the physics of cars and ramps using speed trials.

We finished our first day playing in an engineering and design environment called EDISON. Students will be using EDISON throughout the week to design a concept car, print blueprints for their car, built it, and test it. Today, students learned how to make parts for their cars and move within the computer environment.

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 learned about “making ‘slime,’ and about Iowa State Univercity.”

“it is really fun!!”

“I want to see what we can mix to make different subsinstes”

“I learned about 3-D pens and virtual vision glasses and oobleck.”

“STEM means scients, technogily, engornarying, mathematics”

I want to learn more “because it going to help me!”

I learned about “space. I didn’t know a lot about the sun.”

"I liked that we got to test what we lernd :)"

"I lerned how gravity effects cars."

I learned "that they have a app to make you own car and we had did the toothpaste."

"I would love to learn more about chemical reactions because I love to do expriements."

Conversation Starters

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

• Ask your student to tell you about making Elephant Toothpaste or how to get a genie out of a bottle.
• Have your student tell you about how they figured out who committed the crime of exploding the chemistry lab.
• Talk about Newtonian and non-Newtonian substances.
• Discuss the facts students learned about space and the sea from exploring those environment virtually.
• Ask, how does height affect the speed of a car?
• Discuss why creating a model first is important during the engineering process.

Photos of the Day

Each day we’ll post camp highlights. 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!

Photos from Day 1