junior program summer site : conversations : second session



	ray from japan (8/4) Ray is a 5th grade international student from Japan. He enjoys managing his own baseball team in his "Baseball Bosses" course and compares Explo to a cheetah -- because it's active and fun. Is this your first summer at Explo? Yeah. How do you like it? It’s good. I like my friends here, and it’s really easy to make good friends. The students here are nice, and they’re from all different places. I have friends from all over -- like Korea, China, the United States, and Italy. I also have one friend here from my school in Japan. What’s the staff at Explo like? It’s easy to solve stuff with them. They do a lot of stuff. There are all kinds of teachers, and sometimes they do sports and stuff. The staff is funny -- they sing funny songs sometimes. How is Explo different from school? It’s easier to solve problems here than at school, because at school the teachers sometimes don’t care about problems. Here, at Explo, a lot of teachers really talk about stuff. There are also a lot more classes here, and you can try out a lot of new stuff. Which courses are you taking? For my two main courses, I’m taking “Baseball Bosses” and “Big Dig Challenge”, which is Lego engineering. For my mini-courses, I’m taking basketball and lacrosse. This has been my first time playing lacrosse, and I like it. We’ve been learning how to field the balls from the ground and stuff. What are you doing in “Baseball Bosses”? We make our own baseball team and we manage it and make money from it. We draft players from different baseball teams. We keep track of the players and write the points on our chart, and then we keep track of their progress every day. We also design their uniforms and stadiums. How did your draft go? Pretty good, but I don’t think we have enough pitchers. What do your uniforms and your stadium look like? The stadium is really small, but there’s a play land at the end. The uniforms just say “Racers”. Our team is from Minneapolis. What do you do in “Big Dig Challenge”? We make model vehicles with Legos, and now we’re making this car that can dig underground. We use RCX boxes to program them. They’re like a box that works like an engine, and it controls the car. Where did you go on trips this weekend? Yesterday I went on the flying trapeze trip, and we swung on these bars and hung from our legs and stuff. It was fun. There was someone hanging from another trapeze, and when I went, they would catch me. It was pretty big and pretty high up from the ground. They showed us everything we needed to do and some tricks and stuff. It wasn’t that hard. It was kind of scary the first time, but then I got the hang of it. Today I went to Water Country, which is basically a water park with a lot of water slides. It was really fun. I liked this ride called “Geronimo”. It’s a water slide that goes, like, straight down. It’s fast. What was your favorite trip of the summer? I liked flying trapeze the best, and Water Country the second best. Would you recommend Explo to a friend at home? Oh, yeah! It’s really nice, and they plan a lot of good things, like trips. The people are really nice. It’s basically a program where you can do a lot of different activities, and there are so many nice people. If Explo were a type of animal, what would it be? A cheetah, I guess. I like cheetahs, and I like Explo a lot. It’s really an active Program and it’s really fun. more conversations > first session \| second session