Day 1: Getting to Know Each Other and the Equipment

The first day starts like all of the others, the campers assembled in the cafeteria and checked in with the CITs, Mr. Tower, and myself.



Then we went down to one of the rooms and went around giving quick introductions. I showed off my name learning prowess and learned every camper's name by 10:30! (Although remembering them on Tuesday will be a different story)
After all the intros and expectations talk, we got the campers up and moving with some ice breaker activities. Here is where the lines between Rutland, Holden, Sterling, Princeton, and Paxton become a little blurry and a new togetherness of Wachusett begins to take shape.

The first activity was to see how long the campers could extend 2 cotton balls. (The answer is very far, one group made a string over 9 meters long!) It is great to see the campers working together.



After this activity, we did another simple one where campers had to see how many drops of water they could put on a penny. Surface tension in action is always cool to see.




After lunch in the caf, we then broke out the cool toys: All of our Dell Minis! Data collection will be key to performing a project and these Minis are very useful in this regard. This was also the the first introduction students had to LoggerPro, the software they will be using all next year for collecting data on their projects and in class.





We had the students use a temperature probe to record how the temperature of an ice water bath would change when salt is added to it. A simple activity, but still important to show easy LoggerPro is to use.




Mr. Tower then showed how the LoggerPro program can do some graphical analysis. After that we had some freeze pops to cool down and that ended the first day of camp.

Tuesday has a lot more in store because its PROBE DAY! The CITs spent most of the first day planning many activities for tomorrow to show off all the devices that can be used for collection.