ESU Hosts Hands-On Summer Camp To Inspire Students

Nearly four dozen students are taking advantage of hands-on activities at a summer camp hosted by ESU #8 in Neligh.

The camp focused on science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) for students in grades 3-8. 

“There are growing job opportunities in the fields of STEAM.  We hope this summer camp will inspire kids to explore some of what STEAM has to offer them in their future," said staff developer Heidi Rethmeier.

Tuesday was for grades 3-5 with students from Neligh-Oakdale, Elgin, Clearwater-Orchard and O’Neill attending. Wednesday will be students in grades 6-8 and from Neligh-Oakdale, Stuart, Pierce, Clearwater-Orchard, West Boyd and Elgin.

“We were so happy to have so many kids from our ESU 8 schools participate in today’s learning opportunity," said staff developer Steph Wanek. "The kids were very engaged in all of the hands-on activities. We hope that we showed them some fun ways to keep learning at home all summer.” 

Activities included the following:

Fingerprint Forensics and Photo Editing- Students combined science, technology and art.  Learned about the history of using fingerprints for forensics, fingerprint styles, and how they are used to solve crimes.  They printed their fingerprints on note cards and took digital photos of them.  Then using an app, edited the photos to include fun colors, overlays, and their names.

Scale drawings- Students learned how to read maps using coordinates then created a scale drawing by expanding a small one page picture onto a large wall.

Coding- Students created their own “Flappy Bird” video game through the Hour of Code website.  They used block programing to complete the computer code for the game.

Makey Makey- Students explored a tool to control a computer using electrical circuits.  They learned about electrical science and used engineering to design their own game controllers.

Robotics - Students in 6-8th grade learned how to program a CEENBoT robot.  Their task was to program the robot to move from a specified starting point to a finish line using block programming.