Summer Week 4&5!

Week 4 at SET was all about the good guys.

In CSI Detective the older kids learned how to investigate a crime scene. They gathered and analyzed evidence using techniques like blood typing, fingerprint matching, and chemical analysis. After lunch, in Secret Agent Academy, they practiced crawling between laser tripwires, slipping out of handcuffs, wearing disguises, decoding encrypted messages, and how to use their brain to solve tricky situations they might end up in. On the last day all their training came together as they carried out the mission to thwart sinister Dr. Z and his zombie army. And, of course, they learned how to avoid getting caught in the first place. They used these abilities on the final day to make it past the sinister Dr. Z's traps and foil his plans.

Meanwhile, the younger class learn how to harness the sun, wind and water in Green Energy, creating such useful items as windmills and solar cookers. Then in Hero Quest, they battled mighty monsters, struggled past traps, and rescued a baby dragon, all with the power of math.

Then in Week 5, the younger class was been inducted into the many mysteries of sLiMe! They've made (and hopefully made it home with!) their various creations, from gaks and to ooblecks, which have also featured in some of this week's stop motion animations! Then in the afternoon, they learned about sneaking, decoding, and zombie-stopping in Secret Agent Academy, and finally made their way through the laser challenge!

Meanwhile, the older set have been working on saving the planet through green energy, exploring everything from solar-energy smores to saltwater-powered cars, then in the afternoon they created amazingly inventive ways of keeping an egg intact in Egg Drop Challenge, from shock-absorbing suspension to paper cone crumple zones.

And all of them have worked hard at Stop Motion Animation, and their videos are up on our Youtube channel! Check out the great job everyone's done!

Summer Week Three!

Busy week of slime, dinosaurs, robots, rockets and the chemistry in colonial times!

Slime Lords: There is nothing like slime to put a smile on a kid's face. We made traditional slimes like gak (made with Elmer's glue and borax) and oobleck (cornstarch and water), but also learned the difference between mucus and mucilage, why hagfish are the world's greatest slimers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYRr_MrjebA), and a new word: glycoprotein. We also tried our hand at molecular gastronomy and made some alginate worms and caviar:

Robots! The kids built some great projects this week.

    

Rockets! We learned about Newton's Three Laws of Motion, how they affect bodies at rest and in motion, and why it takes a gigantic rocket like the Saturn V to push a tiny space capsule into space. We put together some rockets from kits which used combustion engines for thrust and launched them Thursday to wild cheering! We also made some vinegar and baking soda rockets to take home.

    Red spot in the picture is the rocket parachute

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Colonial Chemistry: Meanwhile, 300 years ago, back in 1714, we learned how people lived in a time without refrigerators and supermarkets. Colonial Americans used chemistry in their everyday lives without knowing it. They had no microscopes, so they couldn't see the magnificent little yeast cells growing in the bread dough, releasing bubbles of carbon dioxide gas, which get trapped in the long strands of gluten molecules formed when flour is mixed with water and kneaded.
Colonials didn't know why milk curdled when they added vinegar (the casein molecules in the milk denature and clump under acidic conditions), but they sure enjoyed the cheese that this process made.
Colonials made dyes out of natural products like beet juice, but didn't know why soaking cloth in an alum solution made the dye more colorfast (alum is a mordant, from the French word mordre: "to bite", a chemical that forms a complex with dye molecules which holds the dye to fibers).
Colonials made their own ink out of various substances. The ink the children brought home was made by a series of chemical reactions:

1. They boiled steel wool in vinegar for about 10 minutes. The acetic acid in the vinegar reacted with the iron atoms in the steel wool to make the yellow compound ferrous acetate.

2. Adding hydrogen peroxide to the yellow ferrous acetate solution turned it red immediately. Kids love this color changing magic! The oxygen from the hydrogen peroxide changed the yellow ferrous acetate into red ferric acetate.

3. Adding some strong tea to the ferric acetate introduced a new compound, tannic acid (it's what makes tea brown), turning the red solution dark black! The tannic acid reacted with the ferric acetate to produce ferric tannate, which precipitated out as tiny black "grit" suspended in the liquid: nice, black ink!

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Masters of the Mesozoic: The kids took a walk back in time to learn about prehistoric life, learning about the early cyanobacteria which made the oxygen in our atmosphere, to the weird creatures of the Cambrian Explosion...

...and finally to our most beloved ancient creatures, the dinosaurs! Our scientific knowledge of these ancient animals has changed and grown in recent years, such as why a plesiosaur could never lift or bend its neck like the Loch Ness monster is said to, how a (feathered!) T. rex stands with its body parallel to the ground, not rearing and dragging a lizard tail like in the old pictures...

NO!

YES!

...and how not all dinosaurs went extinct because scientists are now convinced that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs!

On the final day, they even got to meet one!

Summer Update

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

We've just finished the first two weeks of summer camp.

The intrepid adventurers of the Dungeoneer's Guild fought monsters and solved puzzles in a deadly dungeon full of traps.

The kids made crossbows and marshmallow shooters in Going Ballistic class and ping-pong guns in Explode It.

They made miniature biomes in Ecosystem Exploration.

And, of course, they made plenty of robots!