Urban League Summer Camp: Day 3

Today, the kids came a bit early! I guess this was to make up for being late yesterday.

I started off by letting everyone pick their prizes from the scavenger hunt. I think a few more prizes got taken than were won, but I won't tell anyone...

Next I wanted to go over what activities we could do for the remainder of the camp, so that the students could prioritize, brainstorm, and plan what they want to do moving forward. I had a calendar drawn out on a white board, with a few activities already filled in (tours and presentations that are already established). On another white board, I listed all the activities we could do and the labs we could visit. I then showed really quick examples of the activities, so that the kids would have a better idea of what they would be doing. For the example for high speed video, I used the clip of my doggy, Duchess the toy poodle, incessantly licking peanut butter from her mouth:

Heh heh. Anyways, from there I left it up to the students to map out what they wanted to do. Here's what we ended up with:

And from there, we started planning out some of the experiments in detail. We focused on high speed video first, and the students came up with a list of things that they thought might be interesting to watch in slow motion. After that, we focused on some of the more complicated experiments so that we could be sure we knew what kind of experimental set up we would need, and what materials that would require:

At this point we needed to move on to the optics kits, so we will have to put off planning for thermal imaging until tomorrow.

The kids each got their own optics kits and split up into 3 groups. I assigned each group 3 activities from within the kits and gave them half an hour to figure out as much as they could. There were some extra materials not in the kits that we didn't have handy so for some exercises the teams had to improvise. While I mostly left it up to them to figure out the experiments as a team, I floated around helping answer questions and help with setup wherever I was needed. 

Fun with polarizers

Fun with diffraction gratings

Once the half hour was up, each team then had to get up and present what they had done to the rest of the group who would then follow along. I chimed in with questions to help the teams through the exercises and demonstrate what they learned. The teams presented on things such as Galilean telescopes, mirrors, Keplarian telescopes, holograms, lenses, fresnel lenses, and polarizers.

Presenting on mirrors.

Viewing an anamorphosis.

Help viewing an anamorphosis.

Overall I'm not sure that this half of the day really played out how I intended it to. Hopefully the students learned a little something about optics today and will want to try out some of the other experiments in their kits that they got to keep.