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Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- Computational Astrophysics (Rising 6th/7th)
Jul. 20, 2017—We’ve finally reached our goal in Computational Astrophysics – everyone now has a working model of the Solar System! During the first part of the day, the students added in all of the planets and made them orbit our sun. We discussed how the way we were writing our code was inefficient. The students continued...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- Commodore Investment Fund (Rising 6th/7th)
Jul. 20, 2017—We thought about how to approach selecting a stock and then considered whether or not it is even possible to consistently select above average stocks. The students then heard about the efficient markets hypothesis and developed reasons for and against the hypothesis. Hard to believe that tomorrow is already Friday. That means our main project...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- Poetry in Practice (Rising 4th/5th)
Jul. 20, 2017—A poet’s craft trades on the use of metaphorical language. This morning we read the poetry of James Wright and examined how he uses metaphor to enhance the meaning of his subject matter. We then created a list of our own metaphors which we then used in a poem of our own. The sestina is...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- Programming and Robotics (Rising 4th/5th)
Jul. 20, 2017—Today we got a more practice with variables in the morning. We created stories from mad-libs style templates and talked about how the templates are like programs and the blanks in the templates are like the variables in the program that get filled in. Students also abstracted templates based on a pair of filled-in stories....
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- Archaeological Adventures (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 20, 2017—Everyone was really excited to get started on excavations this morning! Today, every student in the class worked as an archaeologist for the entire morning to conduct mock excavations, analysis of artifacts, and site interpretations. The class was split into four groups, and each group was given an excavation box that represented a different activity...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- Neuroscience Navigators, Conrad/Nguyen (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 20, 2017—Today, our fourth day of Neuroscience Navigators, we scaled up from cellular neuroscience to talk about some of the complex processes the brain performs, including learning, memory, and cognition. We first discussed what we knew about each of these words, and showed that we already knew quite a bit! Learning begins with taking in information...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- Neuroscience Navigators, Wilkey (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 20, 2017—Today, our fourth day of Neuroscience Navigators, we scaled up from cellular neuroscience to talk about some of the complex processes the brain performs, including learning, memory, and cognition. We first discussed what we knew about each of these words, and showed that we already knew quite a bit! Learning begins with taking in information...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- The Math in Music (Rising 1st)
Jul. 20, 2017—Our fourth day was a blast! We worked on performing various rhythmic patterns and learned how to decode patterns we hear! Students even translated text of songs into written rhythmic notation. We spent a good portion of the morning reviewing even and odd numbers and applying the concept to rhythmic sounds. We drew pictures of...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 4- What’s the Matter (Rising 1st)
Jul. 20, 2017—Dear parents: Today was a wonderful fourth day in our “What’s the Matter” course! We were very busy again today with lots of hands-on investigations. We began our day reading from, 14 Experiments That Failed. Next we reviewed our learning so far regarding matter and change, and we added more information to our matter concept...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- Computational Astrophysics (Rising 6th/7th)
Jul. 19, 2017—Today in Computational Astrophysics, we made a lot of progress on our Solar System! We began with an activity that demonstrated why and how the Earth orbits the sun. In groups of two, one student acted as the sun and the other acted as the Earth. They were connected by a rope representing the force...