Benefits of Plugging In at Camp

By Lydia Mockensturm

It’s hard to believe it’s already time to start thinking about summer camp again. Everywhere you look, you might be seeing options for art camps, soccer camps, or dance camps—but maybe your kid’s idea of summer fun is building robots and coding.

Parents are likely to fall into one of two camps—those who are ready to embrace tech, and those who see summer as a time to “unplug” and get outside.

While increased screen-time and electronics use can certainly be a concern, it’s also undeniably a part of our world today. Still, encouraging our kids to pursue their interests in things like gaming, coding, and all things techy while also convincing them to take a break now and then can turn into a bit of a balancing act.

We’ve talked with some of the experts offering technology-related camps this summer to learn more about the benefits of plugging in at camp, many of which go beyond a future career in tech.

In a tech summer camp, kids are able to get creative in different ways than they might in art or music camp.

“When kids attend tech camps like Classroom Antics they learn how to be technology creators instead of technology consumers,” says Sheri Niedermyer, owner at Classroom Antics, an education enrichment provider offering STEAM-focused summer camps.

Their classes for younger kids include activities like robotic programming and Minecraft build challenges as well as screenfree STEAM “brain breaks.” Older tweens and teens can learn to design video games and engineer robots.

“Once they start thinking about how their technology runs—like video games or computer animation—then they realize that producing technology requires an education and can be a career,” Niedermyer says.

Sarah Kepple, owner of Gigalearn says that the distinction between creating versus consuming technology is important. Her organization partners with Cuyahoga Community College to bring summer camp programs in robotics and video game cre- camp can be applied across all areas of life.”

“We use technology to teach kids critical thinking and problem solving skills because we can tie important educational milestones to an area they are already interested in,” she says. “Even learning to create YouTube content develops skills such as brainstorming, storyboarding, producing and editing.”

If your kid or teen has a passion for coding and robotics, Kepple says that a summer camp can be a great way to meet friends with similar interests as they work together.

ation to kids and teens.

“They’re coding their own video games; they’re drawing digital graphics, editing unique sound effects; they’re building and programming robots,” Kepple says. “So we help students learn what’s behind some of their favorite media and empower them to produce their own ideas.”

The benefits of a tech program aren’t just important for future game developers, though. “They also practice broader 21st century skills that translate into whatever they do, whether they go into any sort of tech-related field or not,” Kepple says. “Skills like communication, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, perseverance, and information literacy.”

Niedermyer also adds that the skills learned in a tech summer camp can be applied to many areas outside of technology. “Even if they don’t become technology experts when they grow up, the age-appropriate critical thinking skills they learn at tech

“One of my favorite things that students gain from summer camp are friends,” she says. “Over the course of the week, it’s common for students to bond over their shared interests. And there’s actually research that shows that this type of peer-to-peer informal learning can be one of the best ways to support creativity and self-driven study.”

While you may think of “tech” as synonymous with “electronics,” for example, camps such as Challenge Island’s screen-free STEAM summer camps, this isn’t the case.

“We reclaim the original definition of technology—a new solution to a problem,” says Anne Vaughan, owner of Challenge Island in the Summit and Medina county regions. “We really focus on making the STEM concepts accessible to all children, not just kids that are really focused on technology, or robotics, or coding. We take basic STEM concepts and intertwine them with topics that kids really enjoy.”