Week 7: Teachers Arrive

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Sunday, July 13, 2014

By:

Kearns Louis-Jean

This was my second week working at NIST. It gets more exciting by the day. On Monday the institute for the middle school science teachers started and I finally got to meet all of the teachers. We did introductions on the first day and the teachers went through a workshop on measurement. Tuesday was really cool. The teachers and myself got a tour of the reactor at NIST and went through a crystal growing exercise later that day. Wednesday someone came in from NASA and taught us about rain gauges and how experiments that relate to real world problems such as precipitation can be incorporated into the classroom. On Thursday a structural engineer at NIST came in to talk about designing buildings that will be protected from earthquakes and tsunamis. Then there was an activity where the teachers built earthquake resistant models. Friday was my favorite day. Mark and myself got to be teachers for a day and went over a few of our SOCK experiments with the teachers. The experiments we performed included ones on polarization, basic diffraction, and CD diffraction, and crystal structure. I was amazed to see how involved and interactive the teachers were.

Kearns Louis-Jean