Our first day
Admittedly, when I signed up for this STEMmersion, I didn't really know what to expect. I mainly joined because I knew that some friends were also going to be in it, and it sounded alright from the short description I read about it. I wasn't really expecting the focus on the philosophy behind it.
The first thing we did was discuss the meaning behind a quote from Henry David Thoreau, often cited as the first nature writer. The quote begins with, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” One of my aforementioned friends mentioned the Spanish phrase viva la vida, meaning live life. I like this interpretation because of how concise it is. It kind of captures the essence of what it means to live deliberately, or as I put it, live in the moment, in a simple three words.
After that, we went outside to a small blacktop area and played a sort of icebreaker game. The premise of the game is that one player stands in the middle of a circle formed by the other players. Each player that forms the circle has a rubber spot to stand on. The player in the middle says their name and "The wind blows on..." along with some kind of trait that they have. Anyone in the circle that shares this trait must move from their spot to another vacant spot until there are no more open spots left. The one player without a spot must then repeat this process. All in all, I'd say it was a fun icebreaker, which is more than I can say for most of them.
After that, we began working on our blogs, like this one here. The students who took this STEMmersion before used Blogspot, but we were told to use Wix for ours. I spent most of the time working on the design during this time. Once we created the site, we had to give our instructors the URL so that it could be linked to the main blog.
Just before going to lunch, we walked a short distance to the pond just beyond the blacktop area I mentioned earlier. Once we were there, we had to silent take in our surroundings and record them. It was a fairly relaxing experience, even if another STEMmersion was practicing canoeing at the time. It was really nice to just sit and take in your surroundings, and I don't think enough of us take the time to do that these days. Once it was over, I took a quick picture of some flowers I saw before we went inside.
After another round of working on our blogs, we went to the fitness space, where we could either do some yoga or just lay on our backs and rest. I attempted the yoga at first, but I eventually decided to just lie on my side and try to take a short nap. It was really chill and it was a nice way to end the day.