Reflection: Section 3, Julian

It's been a while since the last reflection. These have been a very busy few weeks, but hopefully ones that will positively impact my own experience and expertise with museums. Since the last reflection, we've had a number of busy days, namely Veteran's Day and Black Friday. I've also been interviewing for the Weekend Supervisor position and am excited to say that I plan to accept the offer when it comes. However, the experience that is most memorable as far as facilitation and education is the experience of running the Thanksgiving Superhero Camp. It's not my first time running a camp or field trip, but it is my first time running a camp with the context of this course. I could definitely see the influence of modern science standards and practices in the curriculum. It feels like the most important readings for contextualizing the camp were actually the ones we did with Danielle Harlow in the first section. The curriculum felt very MOXI-esque, designed to hopefully enforce and develop patience, social and science skills, and maybe rub off a little science knowledge. Unfortunately, I was only around until 1:30 PM each of the days, so I missed a number of the activities. I did work with the Hydrophobic Mazes and the Magnets and Magnetic Slime. Part of the first activity was a good 15 minutes of just exploring and playing with different magnetic gadgets and phenomena. We had towers of levitating blocks, iron filings in various setups, lodestones, magnetic marbles, and more. After we returned from our break, the campers needed to make slime with our pre-measured recipes and play with the slime they made for the rest of the time alloted. I don't think many of the campers came away with the knowledge of magnetic field lines or field orientations, but they did get a feel for different kinds of magnets, their poles, and the strength and distance of the fields. Hopefully, over the following weeks, they would have the intellectual curiosity to look things up (or at least play with their slime). Maybe they might even have a long-lasting personal change and have the patience for the science and STEM subjects taught at their schools. All in all, the xperience was very positive but very short. Even though there were only 6 topics over three days, it didn't feel like we had time to really dive deep into the phenomena like in this session's readings about phenomena. At best, a camp like ths feels like a support for existing school curriculum. Anything more would require a lot more focus on a handul of phenomena or single phenomenon.

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