2004 is a very special year for Shodor as we celebrate its 10th anniversary. In 1994 Robert Panoff started off in a small office in Durham. Soon after, Monte Evans began volunteering as Shodor's first intern. Now, 10 years later, Shodor occupies a two-story office building with over ten staff members, forty interns, and fourteen workshop students at any given time. Shodor is also becoming well known to the world around us. The Herald-Sun now publishes our newsletter, Interactions, distributing through the paper and to local schools. The Shodor website receives over six million hits per month and last year web site activity grew seventy percent. The hope for the coming year is to see a similar increase. The web site is not the only thing reaching the world, though. Along with visiting colleges and universities across the country, staff members also travel to Europe to perform teacher workshops. By looking purely at the growth of Shodor over the years, it is easy to see its success.

Being an intern at Shodor provides us with the opportunity to shape the future of Shodor, to create materials, and to facilitate workshops for younger workshop participants. We are given the chance to see first hand how cutting edge technology is being used by teachers, programmers, web developers, scientists, and mathematicians, as well as developing work experience in the field of computational science.

To get the summer of 2004 kicked off, we began with an icebreaker. We were asked to introduce ourselves to everyone and also tell who or what our favorite animated character is. Classic characters like Bugs Bunny were mentioned, as well as newer characters from Japanese anime. Once everyone had a chance to go we moved into the rules of Shodor. After a brief discussion we went outside for our first team building exercise, a game of blanket volleyball.

We were divided into two teams, each with a sheet or blanket. The rules of the game were similar to volleyball, except that only the sheet could be used to volley the ball back and forth over the net. After several practice runs we were able to get the idea and played a pretty good game. For a second round we voted to play again, this time with boys versus girls.

Back inside, we sat down to talk about Computational Science and issues concerning the computers we would be using, email, how to handle spam, and other related topics. Matt let us know who our mentors would be for the summer and then we went to meet with them to learn about the projects we would be working on for the summer.