Sunday, July 6, 2014
By:
My first day at NIST went really well. My boss Dr. Catherine Rimmer is really fun to work for. I also met Ms. Karen Cloud who is a former participant of the NIST summer Institute for Middle School Science Teachers. It was very interesting to hear about her experience with the institute and her views on some of the experiments and demonstrations planned for teachers, which she had previously done. We spent the majority of the week organizing and preparing the materials needed for when the teachers arrive next week. It was really exciting getting to see all the scientific goodies the teachers were going to use the throughout the program. Tuesday was probably the most exciting day of the week because Mark, Jake, Caleb, Stephen, Courtney, Ms. Kendra, and I did outreach with children at the NIST childcare center. They were 30 kids whose ranged from kindergarten through fourth grade. The activities included measuring the speed of light in a microwave and explorations of fiber optics, diffraction, and fluorescence. It was very beneficial to get a chance to test out our SOCK experiments to see if there were any adjustments that needed to be made. To cap off the week I got to see the 4th of July fireworks display on the national mall using diffraction glasses, which make the show that much more amazing. The best part of the show for me had to be when I gave a little girl standing in front of me with her father an extra pair of diffraction glasses that I had with me. The look of amazement she had when she put them on saw the fireworks was priceless and made my week.
Kearns Louis-Jean