This August, CSI’s Outreach team conducted the Space Science Program at Sophie Gerson Healthy Youth’s yearly summer camp, where we ran rocket launches and observational astronomy sessions, taught students to fly drones and make simple electric circuits, hosted space-themed jeopardy, and challenged students to engineer in creative ways! Our six space science counselors set up and ran these activities for 140 middle school students over the course of the week-long camp. Some activities were familiar to the students, because Outreach had run them during Auditorium Programs at their schools. However, some were completely new—including the constellations circuits activity, which debuted at the camp this year to great success!

The circuits activity challenges students (and willing Camp Zeke Counselors!) to create a circuit using conductive copper tape and a coin battery to light up an LED. In preparation for this activity, CSI had ordered the materials necessary, but the night before the scheduled day of the activity, we realized we were missing a crucial piece—the 500 LED lights we ordered. After all space science counselors searched high and low, former Outreach directors Kate Lampo and Will Specht came up with a creative solution—to use decorative LED fairy lights from the nearest store (about 45 minutes away) instead. CSI counselors got to work splicing and twisting wires and melting off wiring insulation in order to make these fairy lights function into disconnected LEDs. After hours of work, we had created about 300 LEDS, which we were able to put to use during the activity. The joy of the students when they managed to put together a working circuit made the twists and turns of the preparation well worth it.
We can’t wait to see what camp has in store for us next year!

– Outreach Team