Day 4: Class time

Class time.

So today we spent all of our sessions in science and it really gave us some good time to remember what being productive feels like. We had a wonderful american breakfast of pancakes to give us lots of energy, which we would need later in the day. After breakfast we had a quick break to squeeze in some extra sleep or get ready for the day. Then we headed to the science session to wrap up our first experiment of where we were finding where bacteria was most common on the farm. After getting back our plates we spent some time counting up the plates and recording the data. We then went over our numbers with Dr. Pinto using a website to calculate P-value and find if we could conclude our numbers being significant to draw conclusions. Later in the morning we started a second experiment based off the parasitic fungus called escovopsis. This will harm the fungus garden along with the whole ant colony. After assigned the research question "where is escovopsis in the fungus gardens" we went to work in our teams, completing the scientific method with the given question. By the end of this session it was already lunch and we had some tasty hamburgers that reminded even more of home. After a nice hearty lunch we took some time to relax, hike, play cards, or most importantly develop a question for our groups that we would later discuss and use to develop a big research question. When we got back, we took some time as a group to talk about what we would use as our final research question. We then confirmed it with Dr. Pinto and then continued to run our question through the scientific method. Then after getting the idea of our project together, we got going on presentations that we would present after dinner infront of the other groups  along with Dr. Pinto and his students. When we were working on the presentations we had a break with some fresh costa-rican  coffee and hot chocolate. By the time we got diner was supposed to be over, most of us were going over some last minute preparations for our presentations. When we were done with our presentations, we got some valuable feedback to improve our experiments and answered questions to clarify things to our audience. By the end of the day we talked about how tired we were and how much it felt like being in school again but we all can agree that for learning and getting so much done in the middle of the summer, this sure was some valuable Class time.
                                                                                                                 Pura Vida, Logan