The past week included the first full week of Eureka! camp! It went much better than I expected, and most of the campers were very active participants, even if only in the chat. During our STEM sessions, they seemed to have a lot of fun with the cryptography lesson, and trying to decrypt ciphers with them in small groups was an exciting challenge! During the afternoon life lesson sessions, I was pleasantly surprised by their willingness to participate in conversations that might have been uncomfortable, such as talking about consent and periods. I really appreciated the way Girls Inc was very intentional in using gender-neutral language, and that the campers seemed to be very respectful of each other’s identities.
Next week, I will be presenting the STEM lesson I have been working on about coding a website using CSS. I’m excited to see if this intro to code will spark a new interest for any of them for learning new coding languages or actually coding and publishing their own websites. I first learned HTML when I was in middle school, and I found it to be a fantastic way to combine my love of organization and math with my passion for design. I hope it will be just as meaningful of a lesson to them as it was to me.