Saturday, June 26, 2010

Clemson, catapults and computer programming

SECME Summer Institute DAY THREE

I thought I might share some pictures of Clemson University campus and the SECME summer institute, so you can see what I'm doing daily.

Lightsey Bridge apartments You can see my dorm, where I'm on the third floor. Each floor has four suites, and each suites has a four beds (I even made the bed for this picture). Harcombe Dining Hall We all get on the bus at 7 am to go to the student union for breakfast. You can see that it's a big cafeteria with all you can eat: a station with eggs, and bacon, a different station with cereal, and then one for yogurt and fresh fruit.

"Death Valley"
I've been impressed every morning with the view from the union looking out into "Death Valley": past the chimney stack of the power plant, and beyond that into the football stadium. I don't know why I like it so much. The Outdoor Theater Tillman It isn't as pretty as the view of the ampitheatre and fountains, or majestic as the clocktower with its clarion bells. But I like it.

After breakfast we settle in for a full day of classes. Today's we did experiments to measure density...
Catapult into Hands on Science
... and to build and fire catapults in the morning.

VEX Protobot
In the afternoon we built VEX robots, then plugged the protobots into the computer to program them. I had never done the programming before, so it was lot of fun.