GosuCamp.page

The PROMYS head counselor is here with me in Utah. It sounds like a really cool job, but for various reasons I probably wouldn’t ever do it there. But I think there’s always room for more programs to educate and mentor people. Obviously, we don’t have nearly enough financial resources to start something like that at the moment (though maybe it’d be worth talking to some faculty at one of our colleges — I guess other than BU), but I’m wondering about the potential for a similar program online.
 
So I’m envisioning that if this summer is extremely successful, we could have a very nice C2T app, and when Google Wave comes out, we can implement that as the final touch for student/teacher interaction and whatever else. But, as I’ve seen over and over, we need to act very fast before lots of similar things pop up. So we need something really cool to show off our app, rather than having it sit idlely while we wait for busy, underpaid teachers to throw content at it with little chance of payout.
 
One idea is to do have Alabama ARML (or general problem solving in the meantime) training. Some of the kids who went with Grissom sound really enthusiastic, and we could possibly ask for partnership with Mathew Crawford. Though it might mean less face-time teaching (= big money) for him.

Neal: 

> I think once we get a C2T webapp running, as ryan said it would be a natural extension to pull together material and assemble a coherent “summer program” in math (or other discipline).  I could see it being modeled loosely off of introductory college curriculums, so “summer students” could get a jump on those subjects.  I think this is really an issue of how we choose to market it… the C2T site could stand alone during the year, but I think it would be an effective marketing strategy to drive users to the site over the summer through some sort of “summer academy”.  Something that will catch people’s attention, and then hopefully we can keep them using during the regular school year.
> 
> Ryan and I were discussing briefly some sort of remote science bus or robotics team we could implement.  For the robotics team, I bet if we have some sort of skeleton I could get my high school robotics team/coach on board to do educational videos, etc.  I’m not sure how well a remote-robotics-team would work, but I think there could be a market for specialized video tutorials.  Also, i’m envisioning a series of video challenges for not-so-expensive robots someone could build at home.  Students could organize teams, submit videos of their progress, and (if we had the money) compete in some sort of capstone competition.  Just an idea.  For the remote science bus, I think it could be really cool to develop a series of curriculum videos, both instructionally for elementary school teachers, and for the students themselves to watch.  It would be a kind of “virtual classroom” where we would present scientific ideas and introduce experiments that the classroom teacher would facilitate.  This could also include kits to be sent directly to the school for a small cost.  I’m sure i could get other members of science bus on board with this project, and if we pursue it, i’m sure ryan’s video editing class will come in handy (damn electronics lab, i wanted to take that class!).