The teachers wear T-shirts, shorts and tennis shoes. The kids sip Turkey Hill lemonade.
CV sophomore Kayla Wanamaker (left) and Penn Manor junior Mac Gatto test the can catapult system in th
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Cans from the catapult in top photo are shot into the funnel (in photo above), which feeds them into t
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This summer school "is not anything to complain about," Conestoga Valley High School student Kayla Wanamaker says. In fact, she hopes other students will get to enjoy it next year.
It's Tuesday morning inside a classroom, and CV and Penn Manor High School students take turns propelling a marble through the air to determine distance and velocity. They need to calculate what angle works best to make the marble travel farther.
The exercise is preparing them for their larger project — fine tuning a recycling apparatus, an aluminum-can crushing machine.
In another classroom, a group of about 10 students edits video footage of this summer camp-style summer school on an Apple software program called iMovie. The first clip shows the sign for the Lancaster County Career and Technology Center's Willow Street campus, the location of their summer classes.
"That's an establishment shot," Penn Manor English teacher Gregg McGough tells them. "It tells the viewer where you are."
The camp is a joint effort by the two school districts. It is called Smash Lab, and it's free. It helps students make up credits after failing language arts or math this past school year. The two-week program is being funded through the governor's Project 720 grant program.
Smash Lab in action
"This is for kids who need a hook, who haven't seen how what they do in the classroom relates to the outside world," CV High School English teacher Melanie Upton says.
The summer-school students rotate throughout their day.
They spend time in a machine shop where they learn to lathe (they made yo-yos out of aluminum.) and weld.
Each lesson is another step leading up to building a maze for the recycling machine.
The wood contraption has a catapult of sorts that fires the can (remember the marble exercise?) into a metal funnel. They have to figure out the correct angle, so the can drops into the maze, and then falls into the crusher.
CV math teacher Mark Pieters gives the students instructions Tuesday on creating it.
The plywood will have Plexiglas over it, but inside, the students' goal is use the least amount of wood to create a pinball-machine-like-path for the cans.
Instructors will judge them on how long the can stays inside, how much material they use, their ability to work in teams and solve problems, and the quality of the blueprints they draft.
The latter requires the Pythagorean theorem and the law of cosines. The students never dreamed they'd be able to put trigonometry to work.
Afterward, students must make a presentation to the classes on why their maze is the best.
"If your cans don't stay the longest, then promote the aesthetics," Pieters says.
Lance Smith didn't want to go to summer school, but he failed his math class at Conestoga Valley.
"I didn't think this was going to be very fun," he says. "I was coming to get it over with ...," he says.
Now nearing the end of the two weeks, "I'm still having fun right now."
Antionette Cruz, a junior at Penn Manor, says she felt nervous.
"I didn't know what to expect," she says.
"I'm not into the whole math thing, but you need it in real life, and now, I see that," she says.
Staff writer Robyn Meadows can be reached at rmeadows@LNPnews.com or 481-6025.
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