Summer Program 2013-Week 1 Update

The First Weekend: Reception and Revealing the Topic

The first week of the summer program has flown by. Over the first weekend, the students got to know each other and they got to know the Compass Project.

The Summer Program topic was revealed on Saturday as “How can we tell what direction sound comes from?” Our students began trying to answer this question by designing simple experiments they could use to gain some intuition about the question. At the end of class on Sunday, the students had decided that the first thing to do would be to define “sound” and understand its properties.

During the Metacognitive class, students began to think about scientific models. They also talked about the “Compass Classroom” and how learning in a classroom based on group work and student discovery can be beneficial.

The First Week: What is Sound?

Today was the day that the students really got to work on defining and understanding what sound was. During the experimental class in the morning, they explored and built musical instruments that vibrated to make sound. Then, they built a model of sound that connects what is going on with the individual atoms in the air and the different noises and pitches that we hear.

In much the same way that UK online casinos not on Gamstop allow users to explore systems that function outside traditional constraints, this class gave students the freedom to construct their own understanding of complex phenomena through hands-on experimentation.

During some free time before dinner, the Compass Students played some Ultimate Frisbee!

Academic Coordinators from Physics, Astronomy, and Earth and Planetary Science visited to tell our students a little about their departments.

On Wednesday, we hiked to the “The Big C.” There are great views of the East Bay and SF from there.

Towards the end of the week, students build their own speakers, looked at music and voices as both waveforms and frequency plots, and developed a model for how sound travels and interacts.

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