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Grade 2 Category


Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 4AM/PM, Day 2) – The Science of Complexity

Jul. 12, 2016—Today we continued on the theme of computers by creating computer programs using scratch. The AM class created a diverse array of characters, including monkeys, sharks, dragons, and puppies. The PM class made programs about themselves. These programming skills will be useful as we start to build computational models at the end of the week!...

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Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 4AM/PM, Day 2) – From Blueprint to Business: The Math Behind Entrepreneurship

Jul. 12, 2016—Today we did some thinking about what happens before a business opens. The students came up with ideas including decide on an idea, find a space, get products to sell, etc. One idea in particular led to some discussion, “Need to know your market/customers.” We talked about how important it was to learn about your...

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Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 4AM/PM, Day 1) – The Science of Complexity

Jul. 11, 2016—Today in the science complexity we learned that complex systems all have simple parts that follow simple rules to create complex patterns. We zoomed in on how computers use 1’s and 0’s to communicate information like pictures, words, videos. The students translated from binary to base-10 number and to letter to create messages in binary....

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Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 3, Day 4) – Brain Blast

Jun. 30, 2016—Happy Thursday everyone!  Today in class we finished talking about neuronal connections and how fast neurons “talk” to one another. Our model neurons tended to be a little slow so we are thankful our real neurons are so fast!  Ask your student how fast neurons communicate.  We then explored how the brain is so important...

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Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 3, Day 3) – Modeling Motion

Jun. 29, 2016—We made our first computational simulations of motion today––combining our preliminary work in ViMAP with our previous case of “constant speed robots”. These models use the step-size of the computational turtle to represent the distance traveled in each increment of time and can be used predict total distances traveled in longer, imagined trips of our...

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Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 3, Day 3) – Brain Blast

Jun. 29, 2016—Today was a very active one for all our brains!  We went deeper into the brain to learn about its specialized cell, the neuron.  Students first investigated the parts of the neuron including the soma, dendrite, axon, axon terminal, and myelin.  They created their own 3D model of various neurons including sensory, motor, interneurons and...

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Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 3, Day 2) – Modeling Motion

Jun. 28, 2016—Tuesday has sped by us.  The genre of computer programming we are working in is called agent-based programming and modeling, and taking the perspective of the computational agent is key to making sense of the commands.  We’ve been working on “thinking like” the agent. The programming language we are using is called ViMAP (Visual Multi-Agent...

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