Math and Science Camps
For years I have been helping run and organize math and science camps at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Most recently I have been an organizer of Math Quest, Queen’s math camp for girls, but in the past have also developed camps for the Enrichment Studies Unit.
Below are some of the lessons I have developed for high school level science and math camps. If you are ever in need of some activity ideas, feel free to shoot me an email.
For the 2016 Math Quest camp I had the students make circuits with watch batteries, paperclips and fasteners. The students could design what they wanted, with as many lights as they could figure out how to light. We even went to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre to turn their circuit skills into shadow art. Check out his Instructable for a detailed description of how to get started.
I developed a camp programming class for high school girls. The goal was to get the students comfortable with programming. The Queen’s Engineering course APSC 142 let us use their robots and software. The students were taught a crash course in C, and then were on their own to program their robots to be efficient balloon killing machines. The student fasten tacks to their robots and then programed them to pop as many balloons in an arena as they could in 30 seconds.
If you look hard enough, you can pretty much find the fibonacci sequence everywhere in nature. You can even explain why pinecones have exactly 8 or 13 (depending on the direction you count in) with use of the golden ratio and optimal seed packing.