Summer Of Stem and More at Collegiate
Stories by Cora Smallwood, Joseph Butler and Jonica McCray. Photos from summer enrichment photography students.
Summer 2014 Collegiate Academy.
The Summer Enrichment Program at Collegiate allows current students and some alumni to receive insight on stuff they are interested in. Programs range from dance, robotics, football boot camp, basketball boot camp, band camp, photography, 3D printing and engineering. Enjoy our slideshow and stories.
- Cora Smallwood, 2014 graduate of Friendship Collegiate Academy.
NCIS: Prompt for Presentation!
In NCIS Cyber Security, I learned quite a bit. At the beginning, I didn't know the SYEP summer program had NCIS, but a mutual friend told me about it. So I checked it out. I started a week late, but on my first day Mr. Henry was polite enough to let me stay. At the end of my first day, I wasn't too far behind the others. I worked hard on day one and learned about the two types of hacking. One type is illegal and the other is legal. At first, my definition of hacking was illegally hacking websites, jailbreaking phones or shutting down the electricity in the whole city. After the first lesson, I found out that my idea of hacking was illegal. I was thinking to myself “isn't hacking illegal anyway?” Mr. Henry helped me learn how to hack, but hack legally. I learned about two different interactions called access, and trust. Access is an interaction made by strangers to benefit you. Trust is an interaction between people who are familiar with each other. Over time, the lessons taught me tricks when using email. For example, I found out that instead of using the ‘@’ symbol, you can just type the word ‘AT’. This avoids spam mail being sent to you from random advertisers. While in NCIS, I made friends with the majority of everyone. We had great laughs and helped each other out. Hopefully, one day I will be able to work as an official NCIS worker to help keep our email and credit card information safe.
- Joseph Butler, 9th grade, Friendship Collegiate Academy.
Fitness for Life
“Take care of your body from the inside out. You only have one body, so make it the best it can be.”
During the summer enrichment program we learned the basics of what it means to be healthy, how to track our calories, how to eat to live and how to stay fit. We did various things to help increase our endurance level and all around health. We ran everyday! It seems like we would add a mile every 3 days. We ran from the school to Deanwood Recreation Center and then do suicides on their field. Some days we would run over four miles to Kenilworth track. We also ran on the bleachers using weights and other techniques. Oh and how could I forget about the dreaded “Ab Challenge”, or should I say “Death Challenge”. Imagine doing leg lifts, V-ups, mountain climbers, russian twists, bicycles and planking for over two minutes and then increasing the number by 10 each day. Yoga, line dancing, T25, Insanity and other videos were also added to our everyday work out. I know it sounds painful but in the end, it’s all worth it. You really see results. I started the program at 155 lbs. and I'm leaving at 140. I’m hoping I’ll lose more. I took a lot from this program and will carry on what I learned here with me to college. I learned better eating habits, good workout techniques, and how to push myself to the very end with mental strength.
And trust me our class needed it with Ms. Hazel. This summer enrichment program was very beneficial and I really enjoyed myself.
-Jonica McCray is a June 2014 graduate of Friendship Collegiate Academy who will be attending University of Toledo in the fall.
The Life of Amazing Robots
Robotics this summer was a very fun experience. The class, part of the summer enrichment program, is designed to teach students about robots. First thing we did in our class was to learn how to use the robot virtually. The virtual world had plenty of daily challenges. Within the virtual world we had to type our own code to make the robots move. Second, we had two days to completely build our robots. On the third day we downloaded programs to our physical robots to make them move. During the rest of the days, our teacher gave daily challenges to complete including attaching additional parts to the robots and downloading our own program. While programming and putting the robot together, we faced plenty of challenges. When connecting the robot to the computer, we had to make sure that all the ports in the pre-made program were the same as the ports on our robot. We had problems connecting the robot to its controller wirelessly. If you didn't connect the controller to the robot in the time that was recommended, it would automatically disconnect and you would have to start all over. The pieces were very little and easy to lose. So we had to be very careful and remember what we did with them. We also had problems with Vexnet, a program that could disconnect at any possible time without notice. We faced plenty of problems, but there weren’t any too difficult to fix. We had battles once everybody finished putting together their own robots, downloading all the software and current firmware...“battles to the death” as some people in the class would say. The battles were fought among five teams in the class and the rewards were Pop Tarts. On Wednesday July 30, 2014, we premiered our robots and made presentations about what we did in the Collegiate auditorium. - Cora Smallwood, 2014 graduate, Friendship Collegiate Academy.
3D Engineering
My experience in this engineering class has been a success. We created lots of things in 3D, including chess pieces that describe our core values at Friendship Collegiate. We also created phone cases, name tags and key chains. We are currently working on cars that run on rubber bands and balloons. The process of making everything was kind of difficult because some of us were just learning how to use Inventor, an online program to sketch out our items. With Inventor, we created the easy stuff first to learn how to use the site—like phone cases and key chains. When we first began this program we had help from our instructor. Then we worked on our own. It took about 20 hours to print three cases in 3D. It took about 18 hours to print each chess piece. The chess pieces we made represent each core value. Some chess pieces represented more than one core value. The king represent integrity. The knight shows confidence by holding the flag. The queen symbolizes caring by holding the heart. The pawn represents commitment and respect by holding the left hand on the heart and holding the right hand in a military salute. The bishop represents persistence by carrying the bishop’s insignia. The hour glass forms the shape of the rook which is used as a symbol for patience. All the chess pieces have the Friendship House as the base which symbolizes unity to link the figures to our school.