So the second day of my internship was another fun, successful day.
After the morning meeting, the twelve interns and I walked across campus to the red barn. There we participated in some team building exercises. The exercises began easy, like how fast can we throw a ball in a certain pattern, but got steadily harder. However they were still all fun and challenged our brains. I got to know my fellow interns better, and learned about how important communication is.
After the team building, Leander and I went to our lab. There we continued on reading the textbook. We did that for a few hours, then two of the other researchers showed us some different demonstrations for festivals and classrooms. They showed us this because part of our assignment is doing an outreach project to teach kids in the community about astronomy. The first demo was showing the distance between each planet using paper and stickers. It was really cool seeing how everything was spread apart in the solar system. The second demonstration was about light, and how it diffracts depending on what elements are present. This was showed by turning on gas tubes filled with one element and then viewing the lit up tube with a pair of diffraction glasses so we could see the emission spectrum. I had done something similar in physics so it was a fun review.
After that we headed back to the lab and brainstormed our own ideas for outreach projects. I've never done anything like this before, and found it challenging to come up with fun interactive ideas that can teach younger children about more challenging concepts in astronomy. I had to think about what kind of things that I would enjoy if I was a kid. We came up with a pretty good list, then headed back home.
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