Practicing Bravery
~ Photos can be accessed for viewing here ~
One of the exciting things about Tech Trek is the opportunity to walk, live, and breath on a college campus. This environment may be new for our girls, but they do not have to brave through it alone. Many of our girls have already made close friends and are accustomed to the cafeteria food. Today, they experienced their college-styled courses.
First, we started the day with our labs, which consists of semantics, geopanes, string art, the scavenger hunt, mentos and soda, and driving Spheros (think BB-8 from Star Wars!).
Then, we jumped into one of the best parts of camp: core classes. As mentioned, the classes allow the girls to explore awesome subjects while getting a feel for sitting in college classes with likeminded people. They also get to be incredibly creative as well as bond with their teachers.
The Art in Math students learned how to look for concave mirrors and how to create and transfer them onto graphs.
The CSI students learned how to read and dust for fingerprints.
The students of the Hot Air Balloons class grasped the basics and started the design process for their own balloons.
The Circuits students learned about voltage, currents and resistors, how to measure them using a multimeter, and about Ohm’s Law.
The App Inventor class put into practice basic coding and built an InspireMe app.
Structures built newspaper towers and used a shake table to test the resistance of structures to seismic shaking.
What better way to spend time after classes and dinner than to play “duck, duck, goose” or “rock, paper, scissors”? Actually, there is a better way–playing “ULTIMATE duck, duck, goose” and “Tarzan, Jane, Ape”!
But the girls learned so much from their classes. Naturally, they started to ask themselves the age old question: “What do I want to be when I grow up?” They thought through this question more as they listened to speakers from our Professional Women’s Night.
We invited a nurse practitioner, a civil engineer, an economist, a professional photographer, a bioprocessing expert, a structural engineer (who is one of our dorm moms!), a mechanical engineer, and even some of our current counselors to talk about their professional life leading up to where they are today– including all those times they had to be brave.
Most importantly, they learned about all the amazing opportunities out in the world. Even if they do not know what they want to be, they know they have a future to strive towards.