AstroLands Summer Interns 2021 Blog 9

Hi, it’s Lauren and Gráinne here again! Sadly, this is the last blog we’ll be posting. Our internship has come to an end and we’re preparing to go back to college.

We’ve spent our last week sorting out prizes for our Campers, putting together lesson plans and resources for teachers, and finishing off the other last little touches before we go. We hope our lesson plans and resources are a real help to teachers and that they enjoy the activities as much as we did when we did them during camp. We’re sure they’ll have a blast! It’s nice to feel like we can leave something behind when we go, so we hope our lesson plans and YouTube videos will be useful for a long time to come. 

Looking back at our summer at I-LOFAR, it feels like a lot longer than 10 weeks! We started off preparing for Astro Camps from scratch, googling ideas and scouring educational sites for inspiration! We then started to bring these ideas to life, trying them out ourselves and testing things on friends and family. Our shared Google Doc slowly went from a mess of links, comments and highlights to a neat, structured timetable for camp – complete with backup plans and all! Then, of course, it came to rehearsing for our online camps, figuring out what to say and what advice to give to students who are a couple years behind us. Finally, Astro Camps got underway and we didn’t have a second to think anymore as we were live! The few weeks we spent facilitating camps were hectic in the best of ways and it was fantastic to meet students from all over Ireland and beyond who share our love for science. 

We’ve had a really good time here interning at AstroLands and it has really given us invaluable experience. We learnt what it was like to organise a camp like Astro Camp, what it’s like to teach, run social media, edit websites and videos and so much more along the way. We would really like to thank Áine who really helped guide us through this wonderful experience and made this a fun and enjoyable 10 weeks! Thank you to Sophie as well for her help and guidance! We hope our hard work made the camps as enjoyable for the campers as it was for us!