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Robotics Week
- August 14, 2017
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This week was robotics week! We also had Nicole join us as Mr G (Justin) was away for a well-deserved break. Check out our Oka Ferry selfie!
Campers explored LEGO WeDo and saw how the pieces fit together and how these different parts worked together as a whole. Together we built a robot tadpole, then added pieces to transform it into a frog, campers had fun with the coding and found frog croaks to add to their program alongside the hopping forward and backwards.
Next they made the Milo space rover and had fun racing them forward and back when they were done. At the end campers who had extra time explored ways to make their own vehicles, some followed instructions and made helicopters, cranes or other creations while some figured out how to make their own designs work.
We also had lots of fun with our Dash robots, which gave the campers more freedom in coding. They learned how robots need to be communicated with through codes on computers and customized their coding to make Dash dance, race, play their voice recordings, and learned to combine sequences of actions to solve puzzles they were given. Some even learned how to make Dash respond differently depending on environment cues.
Biology Week
- August 8, 2017
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We learned a lot at our camps this week in Biology Week! We talked about how biology is the study of living things and did a couple hands-on activities to explore the different aspects of it.
We did our first lab and extracted DNA from strawberries. The little scientists learned how all living things have DNA, which instructs our bodies to make us look different from each other and other living things.
Campers started by mashing up their strawberries with some buffer (salty soap water). They then sieved out the solid pieces so they only had the juice left. One of our instructors came around and poured rubbing alcohol into their solutions, and they got to see the solid DNA formed out of two different liquids. They had lots of fun playing with the long strings and spooling it into clumps.
Next we learned about the need for scientists to design medical prosthetics, and the need for engineers in medical fields. We tried this out for ourselves, designing mechanical hands out of cardboard and other household materials. Campers traced their own hands, then attached straws, string and rubber bands, to make hands with individual fingers that bend like our own and can even pick things up.
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