The Faculty of Natural and Applied sciences at Notre Dame University-Louaize, North Lebanon Campus (NLC) organized a Science Summer Camp entitled “BE A SCIENTIST FOR ONE WEEK” between July 1 and July 5 2019. Around seventy-five students from sixteen schools in the North area participated in the event, which took place in the NLC premises.
There were three main tracks in the summer camp. Students had the possibility to choose one of the following options:
- Data Science using Python and Science Lab experiments;
- Science Lab experiments and Mobile App Development;
- Mobile App Development and Data Science using Python.
In the Mobile App sessions, students developed a simple text based mobile game that introduced them to the fundamental building blocks of Android programming. The Data Science sessions provided an introduction to the world of big data. The Python programming language was used to work with data sets, perform exploratory and statistical data analysis, and to introduce students to classification and supervised machine learning.
Physics, Chemistry and biology were applied through lab experiments. For chemistry, standardization of base and acid solutions was performed as well as few fun experiments. Within the biology laboratory, students extracted DNA from strawberries and identified organic compounds such as carbohydrates, protein and lipid in various solutions. In the physics lab, students were divided into groups and performed five different experiments: Specific Heat of Metals, Large Amplitude Pendulum, Parallel Plate Capacitors, Magnetic Field of Coils and Hook’s Law. As for the Mathematics session, students were able to see the importance of Mathematics in several real life applications and research fields.
At the end of the event, the parents of the participants joined in the celebration for the distribution of attendance certificates, which was led by Reverend Father François Akl, NLC Director. Special trophies were awarded to students who excelled during the summer camp. Parents, students and organizers were all thrilled to see the end results of the summer camp.
The feedback received regarding the event was very positive. As one student stated “It was a fantastic experience for me. Thank you NDU!