Tween & Teen Summer Camps

“Is metric easier?” Let’s find out! Dive into the measuring system used by the rest of the world (except Liberia!).  We’ll explore weight, volume and length through hands-on activities that help students get a stronger sense of metric equivalents of things they use daily.  We will learn mnemonic devices for metric prefixes and see how metric measurements relate among the prefixes.  We will even touch on temperature.

For the students that have trouble remembering what they read or are trying to maximize their study time. Learn active reading strategies for literature and scientific text as well as annotation.  These techniques will help students make the most of limited learning and study time, and perhaps reduce the amount of time needed to remember textual content.

If you haven’t used a microscope beyond a passing looksie, come dig in and learn about this magnificent little machine and it’s amazing power.  We will do exercises for depth of field, create slides and even work with staining.  By the end of the week, you’ll know which way to move a slide to get your view to move left (clue: you don’t move the slide left!)

Solve a crime using forensic science techniques that you will learn over the course of the week including fingerprint analysis, blood spatter, fiber analysis and more.  On the final day, we will work through a real crime scenario!

How well can you design an experiment, run it and document all of the details?  Can you create something that works?  Can you document it to be repeatable?  How could someone possibly misinterpret your instructions…?  Each day students will be posed with a new experimental design challenge where they formulate an experiment, run it and document it in detail – getting better through the week until they are experimental experts.

If you don’t know how to take notes, this is the class for you.  We will start out with the basics, practice and then incorporate different styles of note-taking.  By the end of the week, students are armed with multiple options for taking notes, ideas for where to keep notes and tips for how to use notes for studying.