SigmaCamp 2014: Semilabs

What is fire? What components are necessary for something to burn? Can things burn without oxygen? In water? Since ancient times, people have...

In this semilab, we will teach a small robot to find its way from a maze!

Along the way, we will learn a variety of valuable techniques,...

Sometimes people want to keep their communications secret. Others, on the other hand, always want to break into other people's secrecy. This...

In this lab we will integrate psychology (deception), physiology (arousal and working memory), engineering (electrodes, transducers, and signal...

Learn how ancient civiliazations, Greeks and then Romans, created stone. Discover how building material that survived millennia was made. Learn...

Students will quickly progress from writing their first lines of code to creating Heads-and-Tails and Tic-Tac-Toe games in C++ and Java. At the...

There is another world in a drop of pond water! It contains many different types of organisms. Algae, protozoa, insect larvae, amoebas all co-...

When a thirsty stranger arrives at an oasis after a long march through the Sahara desert, the locals warn him not to drink too much water. When...

Energy surrounds us everywhere. It is an important part of our life. We will investigate different types of energy, the variety of energy sources...

Explore ancient cultures that shaped today’s civilization. Walk across the globe through history from Vikings and Romans, through Persia into...

This semilab will discuss the basics of operation of financial markets. We will discuss what are stocks and bonds, IPOs and interest rates, Dow...

Think for a moment how much electric lights, computers, the internet, and cell phones matter to us today. These and the many other inventions...

Particles and fields are the elementary carriers of energy and matter as we know and experience in our everyday life. Particles constitute our...

Electrical engineering has been used to make musical instruments for over half a century. Instruments by such makers as Moog, Korg, and Roland...

"How to grill a perfect steak? What is the secret of soufflé that no cookbook will tell? What makes a gel jelly? Science may help you to become an...

This semilab will walk you in to the world of programmable electronics using Arduino microcontroller. In a set of individual labs you will learn...

We all love the colors of autumn leaves. But why do they change their color? Why does a maple leaf turn bright red? Where do the yellows and...

Coloring problems, human relations, power grids, information flows, electric circuits, and even the theory of elementary particles use...

Starting from the Stone Age, humans have been trying to preserve the world around them – the things, creatures, and peoples – as images....

We will playfully discover amazing properties of natural shapes and their, mostly unknown, dynamic relationships. We will use specially designed...

What is genetic engineering? Simply put, you take a gene of some protein, introduce it into a new organism, and this organism starts to produce...

We will use a tank chassis, ESP8266 microcontroller, and Blynk app to construct a rover that can be controlled via cellphone or navigate...

In this semilab we will learn to apply the principles of physics to understanding the world around us.

What is light? what is sound? how do...

What tool do you need to find a needle in a haystack?

As a popular song goes - everybody's searching for something, and we will learn about...

This advanced level semilab may be interesting for those who attended the Chemistry semilab ("Chemistry of Natural Compounds, or How much caffeine...

Do you know that electric current was produced for the first time by chemical means? Actually, the connection between electricity and chemistry is...

We will introduce modern tools and concepts of complex network analysis using social networks as a hands-on example. Participants of this semilab...