Week 5 has been my favorite week of our internship so far. This week started off with a bang when on Sunday Taylor, Jenny and I went on a plane ride. It was exhilarating to be up in the skies. My favorite thing that happened was when we flew over the PWA wetland. We experienced some turbulence when we tried to fly over Martell; however, Sam our pilot was extremely experienced and he got us down safe.

This week was all about extension. We

made our extension “props” that we will use at the PALS event at Celery Bog on Monday and Riverfest next Saturday. Our group will be having two different games for the kids to play. The first will be “Edge Escape”. This is a modified game of capture that flag that will demonstrate to the kids the principles of predation on different color types. Our second game is a guessing game. Kids will try and guess which predator made the marks on our clay model frogs. We also made glitter frogs out of wax to give as prizes to kids during our events.

The most challenging part of this week was hammering down our elevator pitch. I underestimated how hard it is to try to convey all aspects of our project into a short, simplified speech. Dr. Williams hosted an extension workshop for us on Monday and he gave us a lot of good advice on how to give a good elevator pitch. I’m going to try and practice my pitch more over the weekend so I am prepared for Monday.

Our second and last round of high school students came this week. This group was a lot of fun because they were extremely excited about nature. The high school students gave Maggie and me great feedback on how to improve our extension projects. They played a practice round of “Edge Escape” and their feedback helped us make adjustments that we will implement when we play the game at the community events.

We had some great social events this week. We went bowling with the high school students. Logan demolished Mia, Reece, and I during bowling. He was the only one of us to break 100. For the 4th of July, we had a wonderful brunch at Dr. Flaherty’s house. Everyone brought their dogs and it was a lot of furry fun. Reece, Mia, Garret and I did a fountain run. Mia and Reece are now official honorary Purdue students because they completed all five fountains. Afterwards, we

went to Megan’s house for a 4th of July dinner. We lit off fireworks. You could say it was a blast :-) This Saturday we will be going to Chicago. I am so excited.

Next week will be a mix of extension and research. Monday we will be working the PALS event and Saturday will be Riverfest. We will also continue to deploy our models and gather data.

Mae’s Submissions for the Photo Contest:

PWA from the sky A really cool log