Clips from PCCM's 1st Materials Camp for Teachers

I wish I had one of those maroon polo shirts. In our program the number of different color polo shirts is a little bit of a badge of honor. The more colors, the longer a teacher has been part of the program. I'll admit to having a geeky pleasure when I could go a full five days without repeating any colors this summer. Take that, Becky!

This isn't any sort of finished product. It's a bunch of barely edited clips from PCCM's - Princeton Center for Complex Materials - first ever summer materials science camp for teachers, probably from 2004. Most of the clips are of camper teachers giving remarks toward the end of the camp.

It's interesting to see some of the older ways that we did the labs - piling cement blocks on the concrete bars for destructive testing. Through the years the labs have certainly been refined, as has the whole curriculum.

It's good to hear many of the same compliments from the camper teachers that we still hear - that applied knowledge is more important than theory without application, the materials for the activities are cheap, demonstrations with explanations are powerful, the information is relateable for both upper- and lower-level students, and that the summer workshop is the best workshop they'd ever been to.