Bright and early, campers made their way to their week's semilab, settling in with new instructors and topics that ranged from totally unfamiliar to old favorites. Among the choices: "Building an AI Brain: Introduction to Reinforcement Learning," a hands-on look at how machines learn from trial, error, and reward rather than fixed instructions and "Synthetic Biology of Mitochondria," which had campers peering into the cell's energy center to see how researchers are rewriting its genetic code to fight disease.
Lectures kept the momentum going, with instructors covering an equally wide range of ground. Guilherme T. Goedert opened up questions of evolution and math in "The Math Behind Survival of the Fittest". Evguenia Alexandrova broke down the science behind one of medicine's biggest challenges in "What Is Cancer?", Alina Khankin explored another side of science in "Can You Patent This Molecule?" and Alec Douglas ventured into the quantum world with "When Atoms Shine Together: The Quantum Physics of Superradiance."
Math and physics kicked off SigmaTournament today, bringing plenty of close calls, upsets, and hard-earned wins. Campers also faced their first engineering challenge of the summer, testing out designs and troubleshooting on the fly.
Evening brought a rotation of workspaces to choose from. Some campers got their hands sticky (in a good way) with Mark Lukin's Polymorphism in Chocolate over at Circle Commons, learning why tempering chocolate is basically a science experiment. Others gathered in the Dining Hall for Drone Engineering with Alexey, building and flying their own drones. Meanwhile, the Game Room buzzed with Tulio's Arcade Game session, where campers are coding a playable game from scratch.
Evening Club rounded out the night, with Natasha leading a ballroom dancing club and Anatoly running lots of fun with GeoGuessr, among the options for winding down.
Teams wrapped things up with team time: cookies, milk, and a little more bonding before lights out.
Can't wait to see what Day 2 brings!