Academy High Two Day Camp

The following materials were used teaching a 2 day camp on video games and video game design at Academy High in Champaign, IL. The camp ran on January 3 & 4, 2019 and was attended by approximately 20 students from grades 4 through 6.

The repository for the materials is at https://github.com/SchoolOfGames/TwoDayCamp. The material is free to use, and we would happily accept improvements and additions.

Notes: what worked and what did not

Overall, the camp went pretty well. We actually had 6 people working as staff, with 4 of them being high school and advanced middle school students that had previous exepreince running day camps.

The campers were broken up into groups of 3 or 4 students and worked on the activities as a group at a small table. The staffing level allowed each group to receive some attention staff when they got stuck on a problem. Every student had at least a ChromeBook on which to work. Several of thesewere checked out from the Champaign Public Library. Some specific things we encountered were:

  1. The students in general did not enjoy working on Khan Academy videos individualy. They became much more engaged when we switched to having an instructor walk the entire group through the same sexercise in person, live programming on a big screen.

  2. The Winnable Games activity probably was the activity the students enjoyed the most.

  3. Giving the students time to play video games, and physical games outside worked pretty well.

  4. The flip book animation proved somewhat difficult, but the students thought it was ineteresting. Two ways to improve it would be
    • Provide actual flipbooks instead of post-it notes
    • Provide a short, specific animation for them make before asking them to make their own

  5. Early arriving students were entertained by the camp staff playing the game Video Game Tycoon on the big screen and taking suggestions for what actions to take from the campers.

  6. Lots of the campers and staff enjoyed sharing obscure games they liked - that could be a more formalized activity in a longer camp.