Today started off great because it was the first day that I didn’t arrive at 7 am, so I was able to sleep in!.  We met in groups with teachers from our subject areas, and talked about our lesson plans.  It was great and reminded me of grad school; we used a rubric and thoroughly reviewed other’s plans.

We were asked to think about 3 questions:

How has this experience changed your perspective of research?
How has it impacted your idea of your own competence in research?
How do you envision changes in your own classroom as a result of this experience?

From my experience of research during my undergraduate days, I wasn’t a huge fan.  It seemed like research wasn’t very relevant, and that you would have to spend years doing others research before you can get to something meaningful. The Boston University Photonics RET has changed my perspective and made me feel research can be fun and you can do your own research.  I feel like I am at a level of research that I wouldn’t have achieved without completing this program.

My classroom is also a changed place because of this experience.  I envision having a classroom in which students do more individual research as opposed to already created laboratories.  I will also be using the Lesson Plans that we developed this summer to get more of a physics approach into my intro Biology class.

Otherwise, we worked on our powerpoint presentations, which we will be presenting on Wednesday morning, and our posters, which will be presented from 3-5pm on Thursday. 

Lunch was provided and we had the opportunity to talk with the REU’s; Undergraduates who were completing summer research experiences.  They were completely awesome at being able to talk about what they wish they had learned about Science in high school.  I will take back their lessons (scribbled on pages in my notebook) and apply them to my classroom.

Fjodor and I completed a rough outline of our powerpoint, with the plan to finish it up Monday.  I can’t believe I only have 5 more days left in this program!

Oh yeah…and Stephanie made this.  While I’m not a Physics teacher, everything else is accurate

Today was an incredibly long day- I got to work for 7 am and started working on fixing the code that wasn’t working.  I was still having problems, but I knew that around 9 am I would be able to get some help.

I worked on doing final soldering and hot gluing of our circuits, so everything would be ready to put into the boxes as soon as I figured out the code issues.  I ended up working with David C. from the lab, and we were able to get the code working.

We had a last minute meeting to talk about everything that needed to be done during the afternoon.  We divided up jobs and went work assembling the boxes and make sure everything would hold up to the rough winds of space.

I had to run out to the hardware store and Radioshack for last minute supplies like tubing and batteries.  Everything went well, it just took a ton of time to assemble everything.  Here’s a picture of the box that contains our temperature sensors and our cameras, which are under the duct tape.

Tomorrow we need to weigh the boxes so we can find out how much lift that we need and design a counterweight before driving to Mount Greylock.