SPACE CAMP Reflection from Year 11 students Vanessa Ma and Julia Schwab
During the April school holidays 40 girls in Years 10-12 and four teachers travelled to the USA for the very first USA Space Camp and STEM Tour. Our trip began in Orlando, Florida with a visit to the famous Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, where we learned about the fascinating world of space and got to see things that had been in space like moon rocks and the Atlantis Shuttle. Over the next few days, we also experienced the thrilling sensation of indoor skydiving at iFly, an airboat ride at Boggy Creek in the Everglades, and on the last day, we went to Universal Studios and the amazing Harry Potter World. During this time, we even saw a real life rocket launch into Space. Following Orlando we headed to Huntsville, Alabama where we spent the next six days at Space Camp, an intensive program that gave us a taste of what being an astronaut might be like. We faced numerous activities ranging from engineering challenges, such as building Mars Rovers and our very own rockets, to Scuba Diving and experiencing realistic space mission simulations, one of which even lasted three hours. At the end of the program, we all received our wings at graduation where Maths Mentor Captain Rebecca Walmsley won the ‘Right Stuff’ Award for her leadership. Sadly, it was time to say goodbye before we were off to our final destination, San Francisco. In San Francisco, we visited many of the popular tourist attractions including the prison of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. We also visited the Exploratorium, a hands-on museum with interactive exhibits about all things science, art and human perception. On our last day, although we were due to leave at night, we still had a full-on schedule. We received a private tour of Berkeley University by Professor Quan, one of the founders of the World Mathematics Team Championships which some girls competed in last year, before going to Silicon Valley where we visited the big tech companies, Google and Intel, and shopped. The USA Space Camp and STEM Tour was an incredible once-in-a-lifetime experience for all of us and gave us many opportunities, broadened our knowledge about STEM, and enabled us to try new things. It also allowed us to make friends with girls in other year groups who we may not have had the chance to talk to under usual circumstances. It was an amazing eye opener into what STEM fields were like and could promise in the future. Winter 2016
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