Squishy Circuits

Age Range: 5 - 7

Students will combine tactile materials like Playdough and plasticine with electronic components to explore electricity and magnetism in a creative way. As they mold the Playdough into various shapes, they’ll discover the conductive and insulative properties of different dough compositions, while designing 3D circuit models incorporating LED lights, motors, and buzzers.

Optical Garden

Age Range: 5 - 7

This week, campers will explore the fascinating world of light and electronics in our Optical Garden camp! Students will carefully take apart a fiber optic flashlight to see how circuits, switches, and LEDs work. Using their discoveries, they’ll design and build glowing “plants” in-side jars, experimenting with light, transparency, and fiber optic materials. This hands-on activity sparks curiosity, encourages creative problem-solving, and helps campers understand how light travels and interacts with different materials—all while having fun with science and engineering!

Circuit Building and Gizmos

Age Range: 5 - 7

Explore and expand on the basics of electrical circuits through fun, hands-on projects. Students will build various circuit types, learning current, voltage, and conductivity. Students will work together to use LED and lighting, motors, sensors, and more to build their own creations

Structures and Contraptions

Age Range: 10 - 15

Students will investigate the forces that act on structures such as tension and compression, and will design, build, and test bridges, both hands-on and using an engineering simulation program, as well as powered structures such as Ferris wheels and small catapults. Students will design houses or other buildings, using SketchUp, a 3D design program, and will then construct and frame physical models of what they have designed, using post-and-beam framing.

Electronics and Physical Computing with Microbit

Age Range: 10 - 15

Interested in designing your own circuits and building interactive projects? You’ll begin by learning the fundamentals of circuit design and the science behind electricity. You’ll be introduced to the Microbit microcontroller and the MakeCode programming environment, and how this can be used to read data from various types of sensors to control motors, servos, displays. Students will then create a series of projects, such as infinity mirror art projects, radio-controlled robots, devices to automatically water plants, weather stations that connect to the Internet, smart houses, and AI-controlled systems that react to speech, text, and emotions.

Electronics & Coding with Arduino

Age Range: 10 - 15

Interested in designing your own circuits and building interactive projects? You’ll learn the fundamentals of circuit design and the science behind electricity. Throughout the course, you’ll experiment with various electronic components, including LEDs, resistors, capacitors, transistors, switches, DC motors, and servo motors. You’ll also be introduced to the Arduino coding IDE and basic commands to control your circuits.