Community Partnerships

Slick Science - Summer 2008 (4 different sessions in June & July)

Slick Science camp is geared toward junior high aged children to foster an interest in Math, Science, and Engineering. I spent many hours developing a unit on Codes & Ciphers for Slick Science and taught an entire day during each summer camp session. I had many hands-on and interactive things including Skytales, barcodes, making a Jefferson Wheel, invisible ink, Morse code and the enigmas machine and careers in coding.

After the first week, seeing the students needed even more activity and hands-on activities, I spent time building a college treasure hunt so the students had the motivation to learn and excitement of being able to decipher clues. It was very successful and students were enthusiastic and eager to learn both historical codes and ciphers as well as currently used ones such as bar codes, postnet, html and data encryption ideas. They competed in teams and went to various campus sites to obtain clues. They demonstrated excellent teamwork and had fun deciphering clues using a variety of ciphers.

Below are two of my favorite activities for community partnerships and involvement.

MesaDay

Deciphering Clues

Winners

Mesa Winner

MesaDay

Mesa Working Together

Mesa Teams of Siz deciphering

MESA

MESA Day - November 2008 and February 2009

MESA (Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement) is a statewide Public Education program whose purpose is to increase the number of under-served ethnic minority and all female students who pursue course work, advanced study and possible careers in mathematics, engineering, and science areas.

MESA Day involves 200 students from schools throughout Utah. There is a day for high school students in November and a day for junior high students in February. I used material developed for Slick Science but adapted it to be done completely in the Oak Room with 120 students per session. Instead of a treasure hunt at the end, they competed by table to decipher clues and the final clue told them to put one hand on their head and touch their nose with the other (see photos above for winning table for two different sessions.