I taught two weeks of summer camp and they were both so much fun! Here are some of the activities that we did during the first week camp I did, which was engineering camp.
On our first day of camp we learned about roller coasters! We played with marble towers, designed our own roller coasters, and planned out an amusement park. We did an experiment where we spun water around in a cup in circles. This led to a discussion about Newton’s Laws of Motion and centripetal force. In the afternoon we made our own roller coasters using pipe foam, marbles, and duct tape.
The second day of camp was all about destruction, which we learned about through Humpty Dumpty themed activities. The first activity involved putting a Humpty Dumpy paper puzzle back together using bandaids. We then experimented with dropping eggs in bags of different materials, to see what type of material protected an egg best. Students used those skills to build a cushion for their egg for an egg drop challenge.
We filled day three with making lots of different types of toys. Some of the projects included a spinning top and a few different bubble wands. We then experimented with which type of ingredients made the best type of bubble solution. We also built some towers out of noodles and marshmallows.
Survivor was the theme for day four. We made volcanoes out of play dough and decorated them using leaves, dirt, and sticks. Later in the day we got to make our volcanoes explode using baking soda and vinegar. We also saw what happened when we put Pop Rocks and vinegar in our volcanoes. Our last project of the day was making a solar oven out of a pizza box, foil, and plastic wrap. We made s’mores in our solar ovens and talked about the power of the sun.
We had lots of fun on our last day of camp. We made catapult paper airplanes using rubber bands and also made a paper airplane using a straw. We measured how far our planes flew and had a paper airplane flying contest!
