Day 2 Reflections

What did you do today?

I went to the SPCM with my group mates and we did the fastest ball challenge and extracted caffeine from tea bags.
For the fastest ball challenge, we had a ramp, photogates and a metal ball. We had to find the conditions that would make the ball roll the fastest by changing the angle of inclination. There was an additional challenge which we had to find the angle of inclination and position of the ball which made the time taken to roll through the two photogates 1 second.
For the extraction of caffeine from tea bags, we had to use various methods in the Chemistry Lab to extract the solid caffeine from the tea bags. Such methods include Büchner filtration, Solvent extraction and Distillation using a rotary evaporator.

What did you learn today?

I learnt that increasing the angle of inclination might not necessary increase the ball's speed as at a certain degree, the speed will start to decrease. I also learnt how to do büchner filtration, solvent extraction and distillation using a rotary evaporator.

How do you feel about today's activities?

I really enjoyed today's activities, especially the extraction of caffeine from the tea bags. All the PAs(Personal Assistants) and professors in charge of the two programs were very friendly and helpful.

Day 1 Reflection

Pre-camp

The nanotechnology one sounds interesting as there the many facts that were went through were all new to me. For example the Feynman’s Challenges, to shrink the text of his speech by 25,000 times and to produce a small motor. I think I can learn more about atoms and the way most things work. Not really, I'm not really well-versed in nanotechnology so I do not really know what to ask.

Plenary Sessions

I learnt that there are Global Positioning Systems(GPS) stationed around Sunatra and the network is known as Sumatran GPS Array, SuGAr. By using SuGAr and a slab of ancient coral, forecasts can be made. I also learnt that different layers in the ground shows how bad an earthquake/tsunami was(via the thickness) and its age(via how many layers there are on top of it). (Plenary Session 1)
I found it engaging and I learnt that anime were not as simple as they seemed, the production of a 22min episode can take as long as half a year. (Plenary Session 2)
I learnt that a nanometre is 1 billionth of a metre and the diameter of our hair is 80,000 nanometres. (Plenary Session 3)

Overall, the lecturers were very friendly and the talks were interestingly filled with information.