Monday, June 27, 2016
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This is the third week of my internship. That’s 504 hours, or 30,240 minutes, or 1,814,400 seconds spent as an SPS intern. A lot of progress has been made on our project. Our group is mostly just plugging along, going through the lesson plans a second time. We’re more or less on track to have gone through all of them by the time the skeleton of the website is up, which is good.
Last week we focused on going over a few of the lesson plans that have some sort of lab component to them so that they would be ready to be given out at an AAPT high school teacher’s lounge. One of the ones I had done had a lab component, so we went through it. However, before we put out any of our lab-based lesson plans, we want to make sure the labs are actually doable. So on Thursday we went up to the AAPT floor of ACP and played with some water and sand to see if we could produce some ripples. Unfortunately, while we did have a lot of fun making a mess, we were unable to reproduce the expected results, and if we couldn't easily make ripples, then there's no way a class of high schoolers could. So that was a bummer, but it's better to find out now while the lesson plan is still in the works rather than after it's supposed to have been done. Now I need to figure out if there's a video that could be watched instead, or if there's something we were missing in doing the labs which is preferable because having lesson plans with labs is important as it makes it easier for teachers to incorporate them into a science classroom.
After work adventures were to be had at the Bus Boys and Poets in Brookland, where Victoria and I went to eat after work on Monday and found the event we had seen online happening there was actually private... whoops. But the food was good, and we went to visit the National Catholic Catherdral, which offers fantastic Romanesque-Byzantine style architecture and decorated interiors.
The interns as a group went on Thursday to eat at Takorean and get some ice cream at Jubilee Ice Cream, which was fantastic. I got the Banana Bourbon Caramel - 100% would recommend.
Samantha Spytek