SPREE Scientists: Week 6 Summer Camp recap

Geology, meteorology, chemistry, and more! We got to wear so many scientist hats at camp last week! 

On Monday, we wore our geologist hats to explore the rocks around HQ. We began the day with a rock-paper-scissors competition game to learn about and bond with our fellow campers. Our second activity of the day was critter crawl. Critter crawl is an activity we do every day of camp where we get into the South Platte River and catch the small macroinvertebrates, like crawdads, that live along the river’s bottom. During Monday’s critter crawl, we focused not just on the animals that live in the river, but also observing the rocks in the river and out of the river. We learned about how water weathers rocks, and changes the shape and texture of rocks over time.

Tuesday, we became meteorologists. Meteorologists are scientists that study weather patterns and how weather impacts our community. We started the day by setting up a video camera to film cloud movement throughout the camp day to turn into a short video we could watch later in the week. This was our first experiment of the day, but not our last!

In our first activity, we created weather in jars! First, we created a rain cloud in a jar using shaving cream, and watched rain gather in the clouds and then rain into the jar! We then moved on from just rain, and learned how thunderstorms work by doing an experiment with ice water and hot water and watching how they interact when they meet. Thunderstorms work in a similar way but with hot and cold air instead of water. We wrapped up our first activity with a DIY kite craft. Now our campers are ready to head out into windy weather to fly kites!

During critter crawl, we learned about how weather impacts our river. We looked at USGS graphs of South Platte River water levels over time and hypothesized why we may see higher water at some points during the year. We also looked at the month of July over several years to see if the water levels we observed at camp were in line with historic levels. Of course after, we caught as many macroinvertebrates as we could! ​

Chemistry was our science on Wednesday. We focused on the chemistry of our South Platte River all day. We began our day by doing water quality testing where we tested our river for levels of dissolved oxygen, temperature, turbidity, and pH. We determined that overall, especially for an urban water system, we have pretty healthy water! 
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Our second activity was critter crawl, where water testing did not stop! We can actually get an idea of our river water’s health by having a wide variety of different macroinvertebrate species in our river. After collecting animals from the river, we sorted them into different categories based on that animal’s ability to live in polluted water. With a wide variety of critters, we reaffirmed our conclusion from our other water tests- we have pretty healthy water especially for an urban river system!

Thursday was field day, and our theme was engineering, so we spent most of the day outside at Johnson Habitat Park. We focused on looking at the park and river and making observations about trash. We then put our engineering hats on and campers made designs for a project to design a contraption to clean trash out of our waterways. Campers will be challenged on Friday to bring their brainstorms to life and build their devices!

​Friday- the day of fun! We continued our theme of engineers, and campers spent most of their time at camp building the trash removal devices they had brainstormed Thursday. Using recycled materials, it was incredible to see our campers’ brainstorms come to life. It is also amazing to watch these devices be tested and see the real potential for them to help our river! 

We had a blast at SPREE scientists summer camp. We are excited to see all the campers again soon down by the river!