After only 4 hours of sleep last night, a full day, and a 3 hour drive home, I’m rather zonked. But I’m going to try and write about Wed-Today.
Wednesday was Flight Day in Physics. However, I only got to hang out with groups 1&2 and 5&6 since I used the middle session to go and place the 300+MB of photos already taken onto the machines in our computer lab. (It wasn’t just me taking photos, several teachers and a few students were bringing me cameras to upload pictures from.) So during computer class, I showed the girls how to use the GIMP to edit photos, concentrating on changing image size. The classes went pretty smoothly and quite a few girls enjoyed playing with the program.
The evening program was an engineering project where the girls had to design a device to shoot a ping pong ball aloft for as long as possible. They were given quite a few items including card stock, rubber bands, and Popsicle sticks. After the first round, they got another half hour to modify their devices and try again. While the girls worked on this, I worked on the Impress presentation I was going to show the girls the next day in computer class. It was fun working on my laptop outside while I watched the girls work.
I didn’t get to see how things ended, because I headed back to the dorm with Joyce & Carolyn to photograph the cakes the girls were having for snacks that night. There were two huge sheet cakes, one chocolate, one white. And they had white & chocolate milk to drink. I stuck with white cake & white milk myself. Tasty tasty!
Thursday was electricity day. The girls worked with circuit boards, light bulbs & batteries, then they made “dancing rice” balloons. But the COOL thing was the Van de Graaff. And it was working WONDERFULLY – the best I’d ever seen it do. We had puff ball after puff ball on the thing. We only had 2 girls where nothing happened, but everyone else had something happen. The laughter was so great, one of the chemists in the building came in to see what was so fun. She just laughed when we explained it.
In computers, I showed the girls OpenOffice.org Impress Portable (a presentation/slide show program). Quite a few of the girls really took to the program and made some really neat slide shows of photos from the camp and beyond. I learned several tricks from the program which they discovered while exploring. And I showed them the presentation I’d made the night before, with lovely photos of Ollie & Floyd (elsaf‘s doggies) on one slide too. (One of the girls the day before wondered if I was going to include any doggy photos in my slide show. So I did.) The girls got to take their flash drives with them when they left class that day. 🙂
The night was counselor’s night off, so Dee and I met groups 1&2 for supper around 5pm that day and headed over. Betty, one of the former co-directors (and co-creators) of the camp, was in town to be an Exemplar the following day, so she sat with Dee & I during supper. Lois, the other former co-director and co-creator was also in for the same reason and had supper with Joyce & Carolyn. It was fun to catch up with our former bosses. 🙂 (Betty was also my junior high science teacher, heh heh.)
The evening program was Gary Broadbent, the boomeranger. Once again he dazzled us with his l33t boomerang skilz and showed off some of his boomerang collection. He brought with him a young man from Japan who’s been training with him here in the US. Takeshi (not sure how it’s spelled, but I think that’s what Gary called him) is a street performer and did some of his tricks as well. He did some yo-yo tricks that were unbelievable!
After the program, the girls put on a talent show. I sat in the lounge watching it and worked on the slide show for the final day. The skits were entertaining and all of them were better than the first act… (The first act being us teachers singing the B-WISER song, which is sung to YMCA.)
We finished the evening with a surprise party for my roomie, which was LOADS of fun and very entertaining. I think we were all sore from laughing when it was over. When we got back to the dorm room, I finished up the slide show and finally got to bed at 2am.
Today went very quickly. We each sat in a room (or part of a lounge) with one of our exemplars and introduced them to the girls. I got Dr. Vi from Wooster, who is 93 years old, wanted to be a doctor at aged 12, graduated from Case Western reserve in ’45, and helped start the Free Clinic in Wooster in ’92. She was fun to listen to and I think the girls enjoyed listening to her tales. I know I did!
After our last meal together *sniff* we all headed off to Mateer auditorium for the final ceremony. Each of us teachers introduced a counselor who then introduced their girls & gave ’em cute little awards. The counselors did a cute sketch. And at the end, I showed the slide show I’d been working on all week. It turned out very nice. It was 10 minutes long (191 slides) and elicited the right number of laughs and “awwws.” I was quite pleased. 🙂
I gave Carolyn a few final hugs (she’s such a fun roommate) and then headed home. After 3+ hours driving and a supper at Culver’s, I got home to two little kitties who were happy their mommy was FINALLY home. I’m happy I’m finally home too. And rather tired as well.
As we said repeatedly this week, this was the best B-WISER ever. We all just had a blast putting on the camp this year. The girls were great, the teachers were great, the directors were great – it was all great. Yay for B-WISER!