Maker Camp: crafting innovation from cardboard to code

Make a camp is a four day long day camp where middle school aged kids can come and learn lots of making skills and make a creation of their own. We're making, like, a dinosaur sculpture, and we have a moving jaw on it, and you have to have at least one moving part. So I'm going to be behind the dinosaur actually moving it on stage. I like how they like, let you be creative, and you guys get to, like, make whatever you want. Like if you're supposed to be making something in the jungle, we're making Dina. Kids really love the opportunity to see their ideas come to life to take something from talking about it with their group, to drawing it on a light board to building maybe a prototype and to building a final product. We've learned that we can code the robots inside of our dinosaur to make it move. And we were going to make LED lights for it. We learned how to do that. And we've also been learning how to build it and put zs together. It's fund and it's creative. And I like it. I like how we build a cardboard. It's just fun. During camp, kids really learn things like resilience, collaboration, communication. How do I express my ideas without stepping on somebody else's and in general, how the creative process can be something that we do together.