June 6, 2008

The two Middle School Academies were on held on May 17, 2008 and May 31, 2008. I believe that Academies were very useful and very successful. Thanks to the rest of the INSPIRED team the academy went according to plan and made the student’s experience a great one.

Each day consisted of three labs. The labs being a robotics lab, an animation programming (Scratch) lab and a Web development lab. The presentations were carefully organized with the students that would be attending in mind.

The students attending were very bright and seemed largely interested in all of the labs that we presented. It was great to see the students understand a concept after having taught it to them. They were so interested in the labs, that at time it was difficult to pull them away from the current lab to the next one.

As the coordinator of this event I improved several of my skills. The organization skills that I had were definitely tested and improved while coordinating the events of the day. Another valuable skill that was improved was adaptable communication. Since my audience in this case was a much younger audience than usual, I had to change my usual style of communication in order to communicate effectively with the students.

With such good results being returned from this academy it is interesting to think that there will be more academies this summer. I am excited for these upcoming academies and can’t wait to see how much we all can inspire.

My utmost thanks to the middle school students, parents, NSF and INSPIRED team members for making this academy possible.

Rafael-

Certificates

• StudentParticipation.pdf
• ChaperonAppreciation.pdf