hair-raising
experiments
Local
students
enjoy college’s annual math, science camp
BY
ALLISON R. MAY
STAFF
WRITER
Throughout
the
week 90 seventh- and eighth-graders have been filling their days with
activities
such as designing and launching rockets, building a crystal radio,
playing
with magnets, having an Internet scavenger hunt, building spaghetti
bridges
and dissecting human organs.
The
students,
from Pike and surrounding counties, are participating in the math and
science
day camp.
Robert
Arts,
associate professor of physics and director of the math and science
resource
center, said that 100 fifth- and sixth-graders were in attendance at
the
same camp last week.
Arts has
been
associated with the program since 1995.
The camp
begins
at 8:30 a.m. and concludes at 3:30 p.m. each afternoon.
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Chance Robertson, an eight-grader at Pikeville
High
School, experimented
with static electricity Monday afternoon at the math and science day
camp
at Pikeville College
Photo for the News
express by Alan
Kuehner
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The
instructors
at the camp are mostly retired educators or teachers from the local
area.
Others are employed at Pikeville College or are senior science students
or medical students. Also, Arts said several high school students that
were once students in the program return to volunteer.
“They’re
coming
back into it as high school students because they had such an enjoyable
experience,” Arts said of the volunteers.
Arts
said he
feels the program is very beneficial to both professors and students.
“The
goal of
the program is to get kids to see that science and math isn’t something
they should be afraid of.”
And the
students
in attendance yesterday definitely weren’t afraid of anything as they
tried
desperately to continue both their egg drop activity and firing off
rockets
in the middle of a downpour of rain.
They
weren’t
afraid of racking their brains to try to answer tough questions on the
program’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or competing
against
each other in the math/science Olympics.
And
Pikeville
High School seventh-graders Ann Francis, Christin Lavender, Brianna
Mauk
and Chasity Compton said the best part of the week was still to come.
Today,
the group
is visiting COSI — the Center of Science and Industry — in Columbus,
Ohio.
“Everybody
says
it’s the best,” one of the girls commented yesterday.
Another
goal
of the program, Arts said, is to break down gender stereotypes
associated
with the subjects of math and science.
“This is
one
of the best experiences I have had — as a kid,” Lavender said.
“I’ve
gained
a bigger respect for science,” Compton added.
The
majority
of the costs for the program was picked up by the college’s math and
science
resource center. The only cost to students is a $30 fee.
“We
spend a
significant amount of money,” Arts said. “But we try to keep the cost
to
the students down so that anyone is eligible. Thirty dollars covers
less
than half our costs.”
The
program
will conclude today.
Students
are
accepted on a “first-come, first-served basis,” Arts said.
Additional
information
about the program and photographs of the students can be accessed
through
Arts’ Web site at http://campus.pc.edu/faculty/rarts/
and also from Alan
Kuehner’s
Web site that can be linked from the same address.
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