Candid Student Reports

The following (emails) were written by members of the Internet Explorers Club during the third session of the program. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.

Today our whole class logged onto a global chat session with five to eight scientists. It was really neat talking to professionals on the Global Chat about the questions we had for them. The scientists had interesting log names like hhurst, llambert, steve, gregT, Leslie-wx, stacey, etc. They had some of the most interesting answers to our questions and they really knew what they were talking about.

Wes

Today was the last day of the Iec. For now, anyhow. We can hardly wait until the next time. We had such a great time. The most fascinating thing we learned about was fractals. Who ever thought math could be so much fun? First we tried to draw them with pencil and paper. We could only get up to three or four iterations before we ran out of pencil and patience. With a computer program to draw for us, we got some really intricate and amazing patterns. It is really interesting how easy it is for the computer to draw those fractals, it takes only seconds! We also learned that fractals make drawing graphics for computer programs alot easier! It is used for making special effects in movies as well. Well farwell for now dear friend I hope to see you next year.

Jonathan & Aimee

the chat with the scientists was awsome. we learned many thinks about what we asked. the scientists gave very specific answers. i only asked two ?'s

Adit

Brent and I just sent you a note about the chat session. We listed all their names. We forgot to write our names though, sorry.

Wes and Brent

Today was a very fun day because we got to chat with scientists from all over. We all got to ask at least one question that we had prepared at an earlier time. The scientists answered all of our questions. It has been a fun week.

Bob4 a.k.a Rob and Daniel

Today we learned about Fractals, it was fun,we got to make cool designs with lines.

Robert & Aaron

Today we learned all sorts of stuff.But we ae going to talk about the ebola projeect.,We learned about the ebola disease and discussed about the outbreak in VA., and in Zaire. We also did some models on the ebola disease, and that's about it ! We enjoyed our this camp and I hope to come back again , bye, I really enjoyed it!

Alex & Jacob

Hi, today we learned about fractals. Joe's brother Mike the Hairy One (Mike South) came in and talked to us about them. He described to us how complex fractals can be and how much a computer can help in modeling them. He also showed us two simple examples of fractals, one tree branching pattern and another snowflake pattern. After we confused ourselves, he showed us a computer program that could turn an hour's work or drawing into seconds of computer calculations. We proceded to play around with the program and discovered a lot of nifty looking fractals. Before Mike left, he told us about how fractals can be usefull in, as an example, flight simulation. Instead of having to store an entire bitmap of a tree the computer can store a rule to draw it. Very cool. Well, that's all folks.

Matt & William