4 May 2018
We are quickly approaching the summer months. After busy school life and stressful examination, you and your kids properly want to have a FUN summer time. Yes, but it could be more!
While it’s always amazing to see our learners are having great time in our summer camp, it’s the benefits and positive outcomes really stand out.
What qualifies us to write why STEM summer camp is good for kids?
Since Engineering For Kids launched in US, we have trained up 350,000 students around the world. While a lot of young minds absorb the benefits of STEM experiences, that’s even more parents witnessing growth and development in their children. Thus, there is plenty of feedback to draw from and report on.
Here we share a few favourites feedback collected so far:
1. Allows a deep dive into new found skill
Even some of the schools offer STEM related activities, summer camp allows deeper dive.
Think about giving your child a week or more to be immersed in building Smart City, or specific skill-building likes Robotics or Technology & Coding. These opportunities exist at summer camp, and it’s tough to find such focused activity elsewhere.
Plus, kids and teens are able to really get out of their comfort zone to take some risks with their skills, without fear of failure and resulting negative consequence. In fact, in our Engineering Design Process, we encourage learners to brainstorm, design, test and then improve and redesign. That’s what our learners like most in their class.
2. Allows kids to express themselves creatively
All the problems designed in the course are new to most of the learners. They need to understand and suggest a solution to solve the problem independently when they work in individual task or work collaborative with others when the problem request them to work in group. In both situation, learners need to explain why they design their solution in this way and test. Instructors will stimulate their thinking with questions on their design based upon our course design methodology. Learners will then need to redesign and retest until they search for their best result.
3. Allows confidence to be reinforced
Whether it is Smart City design or Robotics & Coding, every STEM activity comes with its own set of mini milestones and tests. Some of these activities might be brand new to your child, while others could be extensions of what they already know.
Maybe they’ve never played robot before, or perhaps they’ve played robot but have never attempted a basketball shooting using robots. By putting the robots in a real-life situation problems, they need to design, test and redesign to achieve the given goal and thus an increase in confidence will result when they master. From there, your student leaves camp with internal support strong enough to compel them to try out for other robotics & coding related activities…and then who knows what they will become.
4. Allow your kids stay intellectually engaged
Some parents complain summer learning loss or summer brain drain for their kids during the long vacation. STEM camp stimulates learners mental thinking on solving real-life problems no matter your choice of the camp. The mental stimulation may also help your kids find a new interest that further enable them for next level of personal development.
5. Build resilience for your kids
This is a culmination of many of the above benefits. New interests confidence, independent thinking, creativity senses. All of these things contribute to the development of your child as they make strides from being a kid to a strong, considerate, competent adult.
6 It is is Fun and Entertaining
There are many factors that go into the decision to send your child to summer camp, and it shouldn’t hinge solely on whether or not they need to be entertained for a week or couple weeks.
Summer camp is many things. If you regularly send your kids to camp, now you have a few new benefits to look out for, and harvest in your children.
If you send your son or daughter to camp to have fun, that is great! But also try and prep them beforehand to ensure they maximize their ability to attain the benefits above.
And last, if you haven’t yet sent your child to camp, and you’re wondering what summer camp does for kids, I hope this helps in your future planning.
Next step? Just think about camp differently and we will continue to share the tips for selecting summer camp in our blog.
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