The afternoon session of Summer Explorations began with a lecture by Dr. Robert Panoff, better known as Bob1. He showed the kids how they were doing the same things and using the same tools as real scientists. He also explained about collaboration and the entire SUCCEED cause. He then handed the microphone over to Alton Patrick, the class's fearless leader.

Alton began by explaining energy levels to the group. He did this using the ever-present baby shoe that only a day before served as an equation. Alton started by holding the shoe up in the air, and then dropping it. The lower height, he said, has a lower energy level, and thus the shoe wanted to go there. All things in Nature strive to reach a lower energy level. We then went into SimSurface, a program that shows annealing electrons. The students were given a worksheet that asked them to use different numbers of electrons (up to nine) in different configurations and to hypothesize the results. They had to run each one multiple times, because there can be more than one stable configuration. Alton then had them "pin down" electrons in different shapes to see what would happen to the others. The potential graphs showed why each setting worked the way it did.

Alton then took the lowest energy level idea and applied it to atoms. This meant that we would begin working in MacSpartan. The first project was to build a water particle. This was simple enough, but then next step was to reach the lowest energy level and to find this number. The next thing to do was for each group to try two angles (the angles created by the H-O-H structure), and to record the energy level of both of these. The students then put their results into a spreadsheet, from which the obtained a graph. From this graph they were able to determine that the angle with the lowest energy level was about 110 (the actual angle is 108).