Wednesday, June 12th

Today was a fabulous third day at STEM InCYte Camp! The wonderful weather made for a delightful walk through campus as teams made their way to their first activities for the morning. It was a great way to start a day full of building, STEM fun, and excitement.

Morning

In the morning, the red group got to spend time with Dr. Ancar and Dr. Santos. They learned what it means to be an engineer and got a chance to test their engineering skills! They built a structure out of various blocks and had to make sure a marble could run through the building from start to finish. They also created furniture out of balloons and got to sit on the furniture until the balloons popped. Hopefully their furniture was sturdy! While the red group was putting their engineering abilities to the test, the gold group worked with five members from the Vermeer Corporation. They showed us a quick presentation about what Vermeer does and what types of machines they produce, and then the students split into three groups to work through math problems focused on trigonometry and geometry. They found angles, speeds, distances, and times to program into Sphero Robots, small round robots whose movements can be programmed using an app. We had a lot of fun programming the data and watching the robots race along their paths.

Afternoon

During the afternoon session, the gold and red groups worked with Collins Aerospace to complete four different activities. During one activity, the students constructed balsa wood airplanes, performed test flights, then redesigned and modified their planes to fly further. Another activity involved designing miniature ejection seats from film canisters with Lego men as their test subjects. The gold and red groups also had a lot of fun "coding" their initials in binary with colored beads and designing (and sewing!) their own LED circuit bracelets that only light up when the buttons are snapped together.

In their own words

I learned "how to control a robot"

I would like to learn more about this "because I loved it."

"engnring is fun"

"You have to work as a team to figure out what your doing"

I learned "that I can mack frncher out of bllons"

"I got to control a robot and analyze code"

"I like to do math's. this challenges me"

"coding is can be really fun"

"I liked learning how to make balloon furniture and do a contest"

I liked "that we had to learn math to code"

"I liked how we got to build stuff"

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!