In the first week of June we launched our brand new camp especially designed for our high school students, Pi-Safari! To tell you the truth, some of us were a bit anxious about working with teenagers in a week -long camp format. But “Hamaari Pi-Cycle” camp was getting loads of high school applications, and it was time to split the group to do a good job for both the age groups.
We were so much in love with the “Hamaari Pi-Cycle” camp name and logo, that we all weren’t able to agree to a name that we liked as much for the high-scoolers’ camp. Just the name took one-month to finalize, and then the logo! We do love the name we finally zoomed in on: Pi-Safari! And we love the final logo too! There was a lot of discussion if it should have a jeep vs. an elephant. Our logo designer’s love for the elephant finally decided the logo, and we all like the final product. You must be thinking… really you think so much about name and logo! Yes, we do! We love to whole process of designing, planning and executing the camp. We even fret over how to welcome our campers! 🙂
The camp always need to have a balance between the right amount of rigor and fun. We had decided to flip all our math session into challenges where kids had to work through the session to solve them. Like in one of our session, the campers had to draw square root of all the numbers from 1 to 10 just by paper-folding on the same square sheet of paper. Yes, you are right- no measuring device from the geometry box could be used. And they had to justify every step of the way. You should have seen the struggle in the groups when they were stuck at √3. But each group just kept at it and finally figured it out. It was fun to see excitement in the classroom. As they progressed, they realized that they will have to re-define their 1. The 1 was re-defined quite a few times. During their reflection time one young girl said,” We realized that we made the mistake in defining our 1, but that is how I learnt how important is it to choose the basic unit.” We were making mistakes, and we were learning from them. And we were NOT afraid to make mistakes.
There were many more session like these in math and science. Science session were all about exploring concepts through basic properties of molecules. We had to observe, make hypothesis and justify it every step of the way.
There were many such sessions and many such days at the camp!
