[Eugenia Gabrielov]

My robotics team runs a lego/robotics camp for incoming legoleague and/or kids who want some more but are going to be too old for it.

The things you wanna keep in mind include:

1) Demographic
Who are you working with? Elementary? Junior High? Highschool?
Elementary and jr. high will find lego/robovation stuff to be satisfying, but generally like to poke around the lab and look at the team robot and nuts and bolts. If you want to avoid that, host it elsewhere. They like asking questions, which is always neat, so have highschoolers who are willing to be around to "CIT" and answer questions about the robot.
Highschool students generally prefer to work with what they'd be doing during the year, so something like a shorter build season or even working with the robot are things you can try. Highschoolers tend to be a bit busier but they'll come if it's fun. Elementary school students parents generally will drive them if they're signed up.

2) Goals
Are you just trying to inspire them, or do you want to bring them to the team?
If you just want to inspire them, but leave the choice open, you don't need to focus on FIRST so much. Focus on engineering, but don't expect them to go running at the team callout. This also depends on the students you have. My team sometimes brings (to my knowledge) incoming freshmen or incoming new joiners to IRI or sweet repeat, because it's a chance for them to experience an offseason comp and meet people. This is highly effective if you structure a camp around maybe working with the robot and then the last friday and saturday are a competition or something. It's sort of like a celebration of what they've learned.

3) Resources
If you do this at a Museum as someone mentioned doing, your resources are different than in say, your school. Sometimes school corps don't support camps where you'd be taking the students out of town, or they just have so many camps running that they won't add yours. (Music programs often run during the summer). Another resource is people. If you have few people, then you can focus more on what they wanna learn, maybe MiniDrive Team or pit crew or something. If you have lots...split em up into groups. Let them try things. It's a fun time.

4) Most importantly...time
Don't make the camp any longer than a month if you just hold things in the morning or just in the afternoon, and I'd venture to say no more than 2-3 weeks if it's an all day thing. People look at camp applications, see a large chunk of time, and go freaky on you. It's best to make it short enough that more people are available, but long enough to complete goals, and short enough to make em wish they could get more, thus bringing them to your team.

I hope these help a tad.
Good luck!
- Genia