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Summer Program Rundown: August 14
Summer program summary – August 14, 2017

Knight Lights:

Baking soda, flour, oil, honey, sugar, powdered sugar and salt. They sound like the ingredients for something delicious, or at least messy in the hands of four, five and six-year-old Knight Lights campers. But they are part of a chemical engineering experiment.

The youngest Knight Lights campers mixed and matched some or all of those ingredients to coat an Alka Seltzer tablet so it wouldn’t dissolve in water. Such coatings are critical to keeping real-life medicines intact as they enter our digestive system.

“We did it once today but we’re going to do it more than once. It teaches them the engineering-design process. It shows them if it doesn’t work the first time to find out why and then try again,” said Michele Messina, a biomedical engineering student at Binghamton University.

Knight Lights teachers and mentors are collaborating with students from Binghamton University’s School of Engineering this week on various projects meant to teach the principals of engineering to Knight Lights campers.

Fine Arts camp:

Fine Arts camp is seeing an influx of students with the end of summer athletic camps. Another change this week is that ukulele lessons have been added to the music camp.

Band continues to be divided into advanced (Black Knights Band), experienced (Gold Knights Band) and beginner (Beginning Band) groups.

New music tech campers are using software to loop tracks to create their own beats. Those in their second week of camp are moving on to composing a song.

“We want them to create an A-B-A-B form, or verse, chorus, verse, chorus,” said music teacher Bobby Morano.

Art campers are split into beginner, intermediate and advanced groups in different media: painting, drawing and clay/sculpture and Claymation. Campers who created Claymation videos last week or will do so this week are working in music tech to add music to their movies.

Improv campers continue to play games that help them be aware of their surroundings and that of their group. These games also force campers to learn through trial-and-error, making them relatable to their experience in school.

“We work on group dynamics. We want them to speak out loud, work on imagination and trust the first thing they think of,” said teacher Brendan Curtin.