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Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- Commodore Investment Fund (Rising 6th/7th)
Jul. 19, 2017—Our first official business meeting was held today. Students got to ask all of their questions about how the stock market works. There were plenty of terrific questions regarding things including benchmarks, sectors, and initial public offerings. We learned that our class is on the short list to be portfolio managers for part of Vanderbilt’s...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- Poetry in Practice (Rising 4th/5th)
Jul. 19, 2017—Prosody is the study of meter in poetry–the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in words which poets use to impart structure in their work. Today we used our understanding of prosody to interpret poems by William Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas. We then wrote our own heroic sonnets and Alexandrine tercets as well as a...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- Programming and Robotics (Rising 4th/5th)
Jul. 19, 2017—We started the day by finishing the mazes we built with sphero yesterday. Students really brought their personalities through in the mazes, programming sphero to say funny or ironic things as it rolled through the maze! Before morning break, students had the opportunity to see each others’ mazes. Then, we started to talk about variables....
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- Archaeological Adventures (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 19, 2017—How can it be the end of Day 3 already? Today was a really challenging day, but we learned some really important lessons about archaeology that we will apply to our mock excavations. First, we reviewed some of the big questions we have been discussing all week. For example, why is archaeology important? This may...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- Neuroscience Navigators, Conrad/Nguyen (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 19, 2017—On the third day of Neuroscience Navigators, we moved away from the big picture of the brain into its minute details – that is, neurons (or brain cells). We had previously learned about gray and white matter – but how are they structured? We took several different approaches today to “dissect” the cellular structure of...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- Neuroscience Navigators, Wilkey (Rising 2nd/3rd)
Jul. 19, 2017—On the third day of Neuroscience Navigators, we moved away from the big picture of the brain into its minute details – that is, neurons (or brain cells). We had previously learned about gray and white matter – but how are they structured? We took several different approaches today to “dissect” the cellular structure of...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- The Math in Music (Rising 1st)
Jul. 19, 2017—Our third day was very busy! We spent the morning reviewing key concepts that we have learned throughout the week. The class practiced performing, identifying, and creating rhythmic patterns, as well as calculating the number of sounds in different patterns. Our curiosity about rhythm notes led us to discover a NEW note – the triplet!...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- What’s the Matter (Rising 1st)
Jul. 19, 2017—Dear parents: Today was a wonderful third 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. We then did a brainstorming activity to get our brains ready! Students had to think of at least 10 things they could...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- Computational Astrophysics (Rising 6th/7th)
Jul. 18, 2017—On day 2 of Computational Astrophysics, the students worked on a lot of pieces of code! We made several steps in understanding how objects move through space. We tied together the concepts of position, velocity, and acceleration in order to describe how an object moves. We then discussed the concepts of forces in order to...
Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 2- Commodore Investment Fund (Rising 6th/7th)
Jul. 18, 2017—Simulation time! Today we tested our skill at picking out investments which were perfectly modeled by a single die. This helped us learn about the trade off between risk and return. Students came up with the idea that being riskier in the early rounds of the simulation was better than taking risks later…they could already...