Students get crash course in sciences at UVa camp

By John Henderson | 978-7277
Published: July 18, 2008

Former astronaut Dr. Bernard Harris asked more than 50 middle school students and their parents on Friday to use their imaginations as he described what it was like to walk in space.

“I had a chance just to look and hang out and take it all in, and what I saw was awesome … a huge blue ball called the Earth,” Harris, the first black man to perform a spacewalk, told a science camp luncheon.

Harris is the founder of the ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp, which meets at 25 locations in the United States including the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science. The camp is in its second year at UVa.

Rising sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are learning this summer about science, technology, engineering and mathematics through a diverse program of hands-on activities, field trips and classes given by UVa professors and guest teachers.

The students live together in UVa dorms for two weeks, getting up at 6:30 every morning to start a day packed with learning activities, from building solar-powered cars to getting a lesson on mathematics at the bowling alley.

“Every minute of their time is structured,” said camp director Carolyn Vallas, who is also the director of the UVa Center for Diversity in Engineering.

Vallas and eight camp counselors keep the students busy all day and rarely let them out of sight. “We’re control freaks right now,” she said.

The mission of the camp is to excite young students about science and math so they continue studying it in high school and college.

Creating future generations of scientists and engineers is the ultimate goal, Vallas said.

“We feel we have to start as early as possible to turn them on because that’s the only way we’re going to have Americans pursuing the careers that we need,” she said.

Friday marked the end of the first week of camp, and it was a chance for parents and other guests to see what the camp is all about.

At 8 a.m., Harris briefly spoke about the importance of math and science, then three engineers from ExxonMobil, the camp’s main sponsor, gave a hands-on lesson on buoyancy.

The guest teachers handed out four straws and a piece of aluminum foil to groups of four, who were told to build a boat in less than 10 minutes. The winner would be the one capable of keeping the most pennies afloat.

After 10 minutes of crinkling, crumpling, bending and folding, each group had a boat in a variety of shapes and sizes — some deep and round-bottomed, others flat and shallow.

The students’ excitement grew as each group brought its boat forward to be put in a tray of water and loaded with pennies, one by one.

The winning boat, a wide, flat design built by The Ducks team, held 192 pennies before taking on water.

David Evans, associated professor of computer science at UVa, gave a lesson on cryptography using a black pirate chest, a gift bag and a couple of padlocks. It took several passes before the students learned they could only get at the box, representing information, by having the key to the padlock, which represented encryption.

Evans gave the students a lesson on puzzles on Thursday, some of which they solved. “They’re pretty smart,” he said.

With such little time with the students, Evans said, “There’s not too much you can do except show them what’s out there and get them excited about it.”

Jason Capelle, whose son Jared is at the camp, was impressed by the amount of activities the camp packs in. “It’s amazing,” he said.

Jared, a rising sixth-grader, said it’s a lot of work but it’s not hard. He sent in his application in December and was accepted into the camp in June. “It just sounded like fun,” said Jared, who is interested in plants, animals and robotics.

Harris, Friday’s guest of honor, grew up in Texas, where he studied biology at the University of Houston and earned a doctorate of medicine from the Texas Tech University School of Medicine.

Harris completed his residency at the Mayo Clinic and did a fellowship at the NASA Ames Research Center. He is a trained aerospace flight surgeon and a biomedical scientist.

In 1991, Harris became one of 15 blacks to fly into space, and one of about 50 people to ever perform a spacewalk. Looking back on that experience, Harris said at first he felt very small and insignificant looking out at the Earth and the galaxy, then larger than life.

Harris said he knew he was doing something special that very few people had ever done.

“I say this to remind you how powerful dreams are,” he said. “You are an infinite being with infinite possibilities with the ability to do anything. … If you are going to spend your time dreaming, you may as well dream the biggest dream that you can.”