Chemistry
Campers got to personalize their own safety goggles.
They used them in classes and took them home at the end of the week.
Here they are building conductivity testers that they used to evaluate various liquid samples.
The kids used a solution of alum (hydrated aluminum potassium sulfate KAl(SO4)2.12H2O) to grow crystals.
Here are some of the outstanding results.
Biology
Test your senses of smell, touch, vision, and taste.
How does your sense of color and temperature depend on what you have just seen and felt.
A couple more tests
Getting ready for an eco scavenger hunt.
Dissecting a dogfish shark.
Physics
Bubbleology
What can you learn from the colors?
Why are they round unless disturbed by air currents or surfaces?
How big a bubble can you make?
Do you have other questions to be investigated?
Bubbles can be constrained on or between surfaces to make them easier to study.
Have you ever made a hole in a big flat bubble and put your head through it?
Or been inside one?
The campers built hot air balloons out of tissue paper.
And tried to place pennies on a checkerboard so that no two were in the same row, column or diagonal.
This is commonly known as the eight queens problem.
They also learned the game Nim and worked on tangram puzzles.
Astronomy
The kids learned about the phases of the moon and made books that showed the changes through the month.
Computers
They learned a computer language and each made their own unique program.
Science Olympics
A series of competitions were held on Thursday.
How many words can you make using the symbols on the periodic table.
Make a tower as tall as you can with a limited supply of paper and tape.
Try to figure out what is in a box without opening it.
Make a bridge using toothpicks and then test it to destruction.
Make a foil boat and test what load will sink it.
Play "Who Wants To Win a Million Dollars" with lots of different science questions.
Your team fires water balloons at a target.
The big contest was to build a platform to catch a steel ball dropped on it.
The ball must not punch through or bounce off of your catcher.
Points are awarded for low weight and height of the catcher as well as the greatest height successfully tested.
One lunch time we launched an oversize balloon from the bridge.
It ended up decorating the top of a nearby tree.
Here are some pictures of successful launches of the balloons the kids made.
Some of them landed in trees too.
But this one went for an altitude and distance record.
It is the barely visible dot that you may be able to see in the center of the circle.
Balloon launch at Science Camp 2008 on Vimeo. |
Balloon launch at Science Camp 2008 on Vimeo. |
The winners of the various contests
They get some nice prizes and the admiration of their campmates.
Field trip
This year we went to Bays Mountain park where we saw some wildlife close up.
