I just spent a week with a remarkable group of young people – most entering grades 6-9 this fall but a few preparing for the senior year of high school. They were the campers (plus one counselor) of our sixth Nuclear Medicine and Science Camp, held at Deane Bozeman School, a public PreK-12 school in rural northern Bay County sixteen miles north of Panama City. All but one of the campers are students at Bozeman, which has a high school graduating class of about 150 students each year (the remaining student attends a school a little farther north in Washington County’s city of Vernon, which is even more rural with a population of about 740).
What makes this year’s edition of the camp special is that the two teachers who led the camp are on the faculty at Bozeman, so I’ll be able to informally follow the progress of the Bozeman campers through this coming school year and beyond. In the camp’s previous five years (2018-2022), I was able to follow only a few of the campers after the camps were over.
During the last several years, one of the teachers, Denise Newsome, has taught precalculus, calculus, chemistry and physics at Bozeman while also leading nuclear camps on FSU’s Panama City campus and in Sanford, Florida during the summers. She first led the camp during the pandemic year of 2020 that challenged the camp’s hands-on character. During that year, Denise (along with her teaching partner Paige Johnson), designed an experience that preserved hands-on components of previous camps by sending boxes of equipment (including robust gamma-ray monitors and radioactive sources usually used in teaching labs) home with each student and connected gamma-ray spectrometers located in a room at Florida State University’s Panama City campus to the internet so that students could perform spectroscopic measurements themselves.
This year’s other camp teacher, Julie Steves, is a math teacher at Bozeman who was recently selected to be the school’s new math department head. She has taught math courses at Bozeman from algebra to calculus.
This year’s camp had two elements that past nuclear camps did not have. First, the camp was extended from the four days of previous camps to five days so that Denise and Julie could insert more work on math skills into the camp. After all, the campers are likely to be in the math and science classrooms of these teachers in the near future.
Second, we invited parents to a Zoom meeting (actually, we used Google Meets because that is the preferred platform for Bay District Schools) on Tuesday evening and several came. During the meeting, I talked a bit about the camp but spent more time on what their campers would need to do in high school to be well prepared for college STEM majors (the power point is available for download below). Some of the parents attended, as did the school’s principal, Ivan Beach. Mr. Beach told the parents who were in attendance that he believes preparation for STEM careers is important, and he invited the parents to talk with him if they have any concerns about the school’s math and science programs.
I spent enough time with the campers this week to know that each one who completed the week is remarkably talented and, in addition, an interesting young human being. I am looking forward to hearing about how they blossom in the future from Denise and Julie.
The Nuclear Medicine and Science Camp is supported by the CENTAUR consortium, which includes Florida State University as a member and which is based at Texas A&M University. The consortium is funded by a workforce development grant from the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The power point for the Tuesday evening’s parent presentation is here. Pictures from the camp are shown below.
Bridge to Tomorrow 