Our First Day at Summer Science

Welcome to our Blog for the 4-H Summer Science Program! Here we will post our activities and ideas about our experiences at summer science camp. Here is a recap of everything we did on our first day:

Challenge Course
The low ropes course taught us teamwork and encouraged us to step out of our comfort zone and challenge ourselves. We also got to meet other people outside of our county. Certain challenges involved us trusting and communicating with others in our group. We learned how to think strategically and outside of the box to solve each challenge.

Opening Session – Monday Night
Dr. Fefferman taught us to embrace our inner-geek. Besides being an inspiration, she also taught us to explore different fields and to be devoted to what we do. She related her research to everyday life and showed us how it influences real world situations – such as her work with the NFL.

Paul Johnson, Admissions Office
Mr. Johnson showed us ways that we can start tracking our grades and entering them in a new pre-college website. The website also allows us to search for other pre-college programs at Rutgers based on our interests. He also gave us tips for getting into Rutgers or other universities and for getting scholarships.

Mystery Tubes
The mystery tubes were cylinders with ropes that required us to experiment to determine how they were connected inside. We then drew our prediction and shared our ideas with others in our groups. This activity taught us the importance of communicating our ideas.

Animal Fossils
In this activity we were given skulls to observe and determine which marine animals they were from. Then one of the summer science interns shared the functions of each feature of the skulls. This activity taught us the importance of observation.

Oobleck
In this activity, we used our senses to determine if oobleck was a liquid or a solid, and we determined that it had properties of both and is therefore non-Newtonian. Oobleck is a mixture of water and corn starch and is any activity that we would like to do with other younger groups in our 4-H programs. This activity allowed us to practice our experimentation skills.

Arctic Ice
We viewed graphs of the increase of carbon over 20,000 years. The key to this activity was to understand how to read graphs and understand data in order to understand climate change and its effects.