This camp will focus on the fundamentals of chess including strategies for the beginning, middle and endgame. Students will develop their skills through puzzles, lessons, and games against other students. The instructor will challenge students with exciting openings and unique strategies as they play games in groups. This camp is designed for beginners and those new to chess that want to improve their skills.

Ages 7-18, let's learn some keyboarding skills! Keyboarding is a lifelong skill that requires practice to get faster and improve accuracy. Join us for a week in our Confident Keyboarding camp as we introduce your camper to the hows and whys of learning to type!

Campers will be introduced to touch-typing skills through the use of classroom instruction and online tools, with a focus on finger placement, posture, and accuracy. Campers will also get to play fun typing games to help reinforce proper technique. It’s never a bad time to learn how to type!

Students will have fun engaging their artistic side in our Digital Art camp!  Create and edit images, shapes, and text, and learn how to make photo collages, use selection tools, filters, digital brushes and more!  This is an introduction to photo editors and visual communication, solving visual problems with digital solutions.  Add to your portfolio every day to show friends and family.

Throughout the course, students will establish proficiency with the photo editor interface and tools, and will gain an understanding of file formats, color management, image resolution, and pixel depth for differing output needs.  They will learn about texturing, compositing, and various effects that can be applied when creating and manipulating images.

Scratch is a youth-friendly, block-based programming language where you can create games, art, music, and more! Through beginner projects, campers will learn about coding and math concepts such as events, loops, variables, and the coordinate system. During each project campers will also develop typing skills, reading comprehension, and critical computational thinking. From animations, to virtual pets, to platforming games, with Scratch the only limit is your imagination!

Create the Roblox game you always wanted to make in our Rockin Roblox camp. Campers will learn the basics of game design and coding within Roblox Studio, a popular development tool for all things Roblox. Using LUA, campers will learn programming concepts such as loops, conditionals, variables, and arrays. By the end of this camp, campers will have created high-quality games that they can share with friends and family!

This camp introduces the cool web technologies of HTML and CSS that form web pages! Learn techniques to design and build a basic web page with animated graphics and learn about the underlying frameworks and scripting languages that can power websites.  Examples of projects include a greeting card, a recipe, and a custom page relating to the student’s interest such as cars and sports. 

Ready to take your games to the next level? Godot is a 2D + 3D game engine that acts as a great stepping stone into the world of text-based programming. Campers will write GDScript code to build games and reinforce basic programming concepts such as conditionals, loops, and counters. This camp will also touch on a variety of additional game development disciplines including Animation, Audio Programming, Physics, and more!
A foundational background in programming is recommended. Check out some of the incredible projects made in Godot here.

ComputerCraft is a modification for Minecraft that’s all about computer programming. It allows students to build in-game Computers and Turtle Robots, writing programs for Minecraft using the Lua programming language. By learning how to program computers in ComputerCraft, students gain extra control over their Minecraft worlds and can create new and exciting things.  

This mod allows you to build fully-functioning computers inside your Minecraft world, then use those computers much like you use a real computer. Students can play games and program the robots to carry out actions, such as mining, farming, crafting and protecting them against monsters, while learning basic programming concepts such as loops, variables, and conditional statements.  

This class requires the purchase of Minecraft Java edition on a PC or Mac.  ComputerCraft should be downloaded; instructions will be sent the day before class starts.

Minecraft is a lot of fun.  However, it is more engaging, entertaining, and educational when kids learn how to build mods—small programs that let users modify game elements and add content. This introductory class teaches kids and parents how to create mods of different types, using the Minecraft Forge modding tool. No programming experience is needed.

​Students will not only build some amazing mods, but they will also learn how to work with Java, the same programming language that Minecraft uses. 

This class requires the purchase of Minecraft Java edition on a PC or Mac.  Forge should be downloaded;  instructions will be sent the day before class starts.

This Scratch camp will expose campers to classic games such as Go Fish, scatter jacks, and more. They will then recreate and remix mechanics from those games digitally into Scratch. Campers will gain programming, design, and problem-solving skills as they work to translate physical game concepts into digital formats. Campers will also get the chance to flex their creative muscles by adding their own rules and unique twists to the games they design.

This course will teach app building for Android-based mobile phones and tablets using MIT App Inventor - a visual programming environment that will raise your kids from the status of technology consumer to technology creator. Apps are created by simple drag and drop features instead of the regular and more complex coding environment. Students can bring their own Android device or use the Android phones that will be provided. 

Attendees will learn useful features such as how an app uses the camera, voice recognition, and language translation. User interface components like buttons, sliders, and notifications will also be created. There are over 22 million apps in the library of MIT App Inventor, created by 400,000 unique monthly users from 195 countries!

This camp has the potential for an endless amount of projects.

Curious about AI and machine learning? This camp introduces campers to the world of artificial intelligence! Campers will explore various concepts in this exciting new field by training machine learning models to recognize text, numbers, images, and sounds. This camp builds on introductory coding concepts by adding models to the educational coding platforms Scratch and App Inventor. After this camp your kid will be ahead of the pack when it comes to AI and how you can use it.

Concepts covered:

• Algorithms

• Data processing

• Classification

• Machine learning

This camp introduces students to coding by creating fun projects such as watches and step counters. Students will learn about the Internet of Things using Micro:bit. This camp is designed for kids and beginners and is non-intimidating for new programmers. Students will take home their wearables!

Topics covered:

• Micro:bit interface

• Understanding basic Hardware

• Building machines

For students who have had some coding experience, this is an introduction to object-oriented programming.  Learn about topics like polymorphism, classes, abstraction, and inheritance.  Students will put these into practice by building engaging applications. Did you know that Minecraft was created using only Java? Students will have the ability to create their own games such as tic-tac-toe, endless runner, and many more exciting projects.

This camp introduces campers to building, controlling, and playing with Robots! Campers will use an easy to learn, block-based coding platform to control their robots and learn basic coding concepts such as event-handling and conditionals. Campers will also get hands-on and manipulate their robots using gears, motors, and electricity. For this camp we will be using the Ozobot Evo and Makeblock mBot brand robots. Dive into the world of robotics today!

Python is often thought to be the best first typed language for beginners to learn!  Not only is this language easy to learn, it is commonly used in the professional technology world to achieve a wide variety of results such as website development, machine learning, game creation, and data science/analytics. Learn to use loops, counters, conditionals, and other basic coding constructs. Python is the real deal, favored by companies such as Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify.  We will introduce algorithmic or computational thinking that will help students solve problems logically before coding.

Concepts covered:

• Navigating a code editor

• Turtle, a library of code to help generate graphic art

• Basic coding concepts