Day 8: Crazy Chemistry

We started off the day with an open ended "Do Now" question: 'what is the most important part of the body?' . We then segued into an intriguing lesson on bones and fracturing taught by Liz. We split into groups to make casts for chicken bones. First, we saw how much weight each chicken bone could hold before breaking. Originally, the campers guessed that the flimsy looking chicken bones would hold about 0.5-1 lbs. We were astonished to discover that the tiny bones would break only after about 19-35 lbs of force were applied to them. We then moved outside where the campers either made a splint or a cast for the broken bones. Some groups used paper mache to create casts for the their broken bone. We are looking forward to Friday when we will see how much weight the bones can hold now that they have a splint/cast on them. We then ate a pizza lunch and played a game of "Leader".

After lunch we reconvened to our room to begin our second Mentor Wednesday! We spent some time chatting with mentors and then moved on to a chemistry activity in which the campers were given clear solutions labeled A through E and had to guess what chemicals they were after doing certain tests on them, including a conductvitiy test and a pH test. After all the groups had figured out all the chemicals, we taught a quick introductory chemistry lesson. Then we moved on to another chemistry project-- the Iodine Clock Reaction! This is a chemical reaction that changes color after a certain amount of time depending on how much of each ingredient you add. We played around with the timing of that reaction for a bit before cleaning up and parting ways for the day. See all our campers tomorrow!