Field Trip Friday

We finished our first week of Spira! Time flew by for the coordinators and we are looking forward to what is coming up in the next 3 weeks.

The first half of the day was focused on our field trip to AS220, a community art space in downtown Providence. AS220 contains the Fab Lab (Fabrication Laboratory), which contains tons of equipment used to create 3D art. The students saw laser cutters, 3D printers, circuit boards, and more intriguing technology. Shawn, the AS220 Industries Director, who gave us a tour of the facilities was kind enough to give each of our students a laser-cut cardboard moose head for the students to keep as an awesome souvenir!

Back at Brown, Sophia taught the students about non-Newtonian fluids. We put that knowledge into practice by making Oobleck, a non-Newtonian fluid made from 2 parts corn starch and 1 part water.

We concluded the week by having the students go to the computer lab to take an Implicit Associations Test (made by Harvard) to see if they had any subconscious gender associations with science and to fill out our weekly anonymous evaluations. We use the evaluations to improve the camp and make sure that the students are reaching the goals that they wanted to achieve by attending Spira.

Next week we will cover mechanical, aerospace, and biomedical engineering!