More than 350 students recently got the chance to spend a week exploring what STEAM can offer鈥攄esigning toys, taking photos, programming robots and growing plants hydroponically.
果冻传媒app ISD partnered with the regional councils of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to offer four one-week TechLab STEAM camps at .
This was the first year Anderson hosted the STEAM鈥擲cience, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math鈥擟amp and organizers, said it offers students something different.
"Every year, the opportunity for having 'real' technology is more ubiquitous and more affordable," said John Sperry, Anderson's toy design teacher and one of the camp's instructors.
One example鈥攖he youngest students at the camps, those entering second grade in the fall, used a program called Tinkercad to design 3-D models of toys or small mazes that were then printed by a 3-D printer.
The camp's program director Jessica Snider developed the curriculum based on the idea of a technology lab located .
"Students test the limits of where kids can live," she said, and learn how to take underwater photographs and grow food without soil.
Roughly 80 percent of this year's students were boys. She said organizers will work toward a more even distribution of boys and girls for 2016.
Sperry said that access extends to students throughout 果冻传媒app.
"The goals of the camp are to make it cutting-edge, but also to make it open and give access to interested students all over the city," Sperry said.
Scholarships for the one-week camps, usually $300, help offer more access to "way more technology, and to all the really great stuff."
STEAM Camp organizers will begin registering students for next year sometime in early 2016.