Our team has thought about running a robotics camp during the summer and we are interested in how teams get the word out about the camps. We only have a total of 1,000 kids in our school if this will make a difference. Also what exactly do you do in your camp?
We’re actually about to hold our annual Science Day Camp in a few weeks, and have been spreading the word about that. We usually pass the information to all the schools that feed into two of the major high schools in Katy via flyers and emails sent out to the principals and secretaries.
The middle schools and elementaries usually have take home packets in which they send the flyer out once each week, as well as info broadcasted over their morning announcements. We’re capping it at about 120 students this year, increased from 100 last year.
At the camp, we run several stations with different activities in various categories of science (Chemistry, Robotics, Physics, Biology, and Engineering) splitting the students up into groups of 20. The volunteer students mainly come from the robotics team; however, sometimes Science Olympiad and Science National Honor Society students come and help out as well.
The camp lasts the whole day and we provide lunch and a t-shirt. For more information or an example to look at, you can find it on our website under News.
My Team does this thing called a tech camp. Our team focuses a lot on STEM activities and this is a big one we help with. It’s a week long, for about three hours a day, and is based around Legos, and focused around the elementary school afe. We have a bunch of the lego kits that come with instructions, not the stationary ones, but the ones that are programmable, either with the older model bases or the newer NXT’s the kids can go at their own pace, working alone or with partners, depending on the project. We, as mentors, encourage them, and help them when they need it. At the end of the week we hold an “extravaganza” at which the kids can show off what they made to their parents, and to their other campers.
We’ve found this to be very successful, having at least 40 kids in attendance at each of camps, which we offer 5-6 times during the summer, which for our small rural community is a lot.
This is especially helpful in the eyes of our team because it acts as a feeder program into all of the other FIRST programs in our community, as well as being a team fundraiser, though we keep very little. Most of the cost of the camp goes toward sustaining and bettering the camp for things like snacks for the kids and better legos.
Hope this can help!
Our team has been robotics summer camps for five years now. They have been highly successful. We use the Terraformers curriculum available from Carnegie-Mellon and have purchased 12 LEGO Mindstorms NXT education kits to support the effort. The camp is geared toward middle-school-aged students, and we meet about 6 hours a day for a week. We use similar techniques that have already been mentioned to get the word out – mostly informing the middle schools in our city. Word seem to spread, though, and we always have students attend from neighboring communities. We use the money that we make to do community outreach and start additional FLL and FTC teams. Once you invest in the kits, it’s pretty easy to make between $2500 and $4000 a year this way. We took about half the money that we made from the 2013 RoboCamp and built a FRC practice field at the Virginia Air & Space Center, a museum in Hampton, VA.
My team took a different approach to a robotics camp this past summer and used it as an outreach opportunity. We’re a smaller team from a more rural area and didn’t have the resources to run a huge camp, so we partnered with a local ministry organization and ran a week long series of day camps using our FLL teams’ NXT bots. We had around 10-12 kids each day, ages 9-12. Most of them had never seen a robot before, much less had an opportunity to build one. We had plans for a curriculum at the start of the week, but later decided it would be better to just stick to a loose structure and let the kids experiment with the robots, guiding them along the way. At the end of the week we split the kids into two teams and had them build robots to complete the challenges of last year’s FLL game. We also brought our 2013 FRC bot on the last day, which they really enjoyed seeing and getting to drive. Overall we had such a great response from the kids that we’re now looking to set up a new FLL team in their area.
I guess the main lesson here is that even if you’re low on resources, running a robotics camp can be a great opportunity, not only for recruiting/fundraising, but also for outreach. Getting to expose these kids to the wonders of science and technology was an awesome experience, and while it may not have been the most in-depth advanced camp ever, I know it’s something many of them won’t forget.
My team did not run a camp, but I would recommend contacting 1023 Bedford Express for the information on their camp. It was very successful.
I believe they focused on Jr FLL, so if that’s what you’re looking for, they’ve got a good program. Team RUSH has hosted robotics camps, including FLL and FTC for students through jr. high and middle school that are incredibly successful; I suggest contacting [email protected] for more information.