junior program summer site : conversations : second session



	Jean from Massachusetts (7/30) Jean, a Voyager day student, is honing her detective skills in her cryptology class "Mission: Codebreaker." In "Fizz, Bang, Pop," she's learning all about non-Newtonian neutrals like "Oobleck" -- a combination of corn starch and water that acts like a liquid under low static pressure but becomes solid under high, dynamic pressures. What did you do yesterday? Yesterday, I came to Breakfast Club, which is a lot of fun because it's early in the morning. . . It's almost like I'm a res student because I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner here usually. I do everything I can here. So then for our first activity, we did "Patchwork Mural," where we got a big roll of brown paper and we each had a square on it and we could do anything we wanted on it. It was a lot of fun. For the second activity period we did "Potato Scrimshaw," which is potato carving. I tried to make a McDonald's french fry container with french fries sticking out of it, but it looked really bad. Then we had lunch. After lunch I had my first course, which was “Mission: Codebreaker” with Maggie, where basically what we did was we learned reverse dummy code. What's reverse dummy code? It's really complicated. First, all in caps, you write out a plain sentence. Ours was “Explo rocks my socks off.” Then, what you do is you put the letters in the sentence into groups of four, so it would be “Expl oroc. . .” and it keeps going on like that. Then you reverse those, so it would be “Lpxe coro.” Then you add a dummy letter wherever you want in the sentence. To decode it, you have to reverse each group of letters, figure out what the dummy letter is, and then reorganize the groups into a sentence. That sounds really tough. What's your other class? My other class is “Fizz, Bang, Pop.” Yesterday we made “Oobleck.” It's a mix of corn starch and water and it's really fun because it's a non-Newtonian neutral, which means that it's not a liquid and it's not a solid. It can be hard, but it can also be drippy and liquid-like, which is cool. If you add a lot of pressure, like if you try to punch it, it becomes hard. But if you're just holding it in your hand, it will drip and act like a liquid. Do you think Explo teachers are different from teachers at school? Yeah because, first of all, you can call them by their first name. You can also talk to them in a more relaxed way than at school. They really know what you're thinking. They “get” us more than the teachers at school; they remember what it's like to be our age. Maggie is my teacher for cryptography, and she's also my DA. She's really nice and helpful and funny. She answers all of our questions. It's just a good class with her. My other teacher is Rachel, who teaches “Fizz, Bang, Pop,” and instead of just doing experiments, she explains them really well. She lets us make our own hypothesis for what will happen in the experiment. We also do a lot of group activities, which is a lot of fun. What does the word “Explo” mean to you? It always reminds me of how much fun I can have here, and how much I can learn here, and of all the international students I get to meet here. I really like that -- you get to meet people from all around the world. Like, I know people from China, from Russia, from Venezuela. I'm always impressed by how well they speak English, because I know I couldn't speak their language if I went to their country. I really like that. Is it easy to make friends at Explo? Yeah. If you want to make a friend, you kind of just introduce yourself, and usually you just talk. It's not that hard. It's really easy here and everyone wants to be nice to each other. Awesome. What's your day group like? My day group is Group R, and we're the “Rambunctious Rabbits.” All the girls in my group are really fun and nice. There are people with a bunch of different opinions and personalities in the group, and I think that's why our group is really special. We're all girls and we're all in the same grade, and we relate to each other really well even though we're so different. If you had a friend who was thinking of coming to Explo, what would you tell them? That it's going to be really fun. It might be way different than what you're used to, which is a good thing. That it's really easy to make new friends. It's just a really fun experience. If Explo were a type of dessert, what would it be and why? It would probably be a marble cake, because it's a mix of different people, and it's also a lot of fun. It would have different colored frostings, because it's always fun and different and colorful. There are a lot of options that you can have with a cake, and it's the same way at Explo. There are so many things to do here. more conversations > first session \| second session