This week was robotics week at camp! On Monday morning the girls received a Lego Mindstorm kit. They were given an instruction manual and all the necessary parts to build an EV3 robot, equipped with wheels, a moveable arm, and a color sensor. The majority of Monday was taken up by building the robots, but they finished building much earlier than expected. To finish off the rest of the STEM time we moved the teams who had finished on to controlling their robot with an iPad through bluetooth. We made simple mazes for them to guide their robot through using the joystick on the iPad. On Tuesday the girls completed some more joystick challenges. Then we taught them how to control their robot using block coding (check out this link if you want to know more: https://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms/learn-to-program). They were asked to complete the same mazes with coding that they had done with the joystick. Many of the girls agreed that coding was easier than the manual controls because it was much more precise. Wednesday and Thursday mornings were filled with many challenges for the teams. There were mazes, tracing shapes, and missions to use the arm to fetch an item. The team who won the most challenges received cookies I made!
In the afternoons this week I supported Kat (a Girls Inc. facilitator) in the Safe Dates/Taking Care of Business class. We focused on how to build healthy relationships, the red flags of relationship abuse, female reproductive anatomy, and methods of birth control. Some of these topics were a bit uncomfortable for the girls, but we reminded them that these are important topics that they should be knowledgable about, especially because they will be entering into the age where many people start dating.
There were also various electives at the end of the day including art, yoga, and baking bread. On Friday we all went to Disney California Adventure! The middle school girls had to complete a leadership program as part of Disney’s Youth Education Series. After that they were free to roam the park in groups. The girls definitely had a lot of fun at Disney!