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Ask Slashdot: Tech-Related Summer Camps For Teenagers?
First time accepted submitter jcreus writes "I am a teenager (aged 14, though turning 15 before summer), and I've recently been looking for summer camps in the USA. My interests include physics, mathematics (to a lesser extent) and computer science (I already know several programming languages). However, I haven't been able to find anything really exciting. The difficulties I've found include the fact that most are general-oriented, whereas I'm seeking something specific. Furthermore, some are USA-student-only (and I'm European), and most computer-science oriented camps seem to be for non-programmers. What are your experiences with such camps?"
There are just too many people in those places.
space camp! run by NASA.
Forget the camp. Just let them get a summer job programming. That's what I did. But maybe that's harder to do than it was in 1981...
You might want to look into something like this or this .
My daughter took one out of this one, specifically one on Physics. She loved it and we plan to do another. My other daughter is looking forward to this one.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe. What are you going to want to do next summer, go to summer camp in North Korea?
I think this kid would like to broaden his horizons. I don't think this would be a negative experience overall, as a youth I attended a summer camp located on the border between Canada and the US, besides North Americans, there were a number of other nationalities. It made for a more interesting experience.
I think this sort of thing should be encouraged, it not only will benefit him, but the other campers will benefit being exposed to his culture.
If you're open to considering locations in Canada, then Shad Valley is a great program that a lot of my friends have gone to. It's hosted by a university in Canada and is well suited for someone interested in tech. I'd recommend the University of Waterloo location as it probably provides the best exposure to the tech companies in Canada.
"Knowledge makes us accountable." - Che Guevara
In the mid-1990s, I went to a Civil Engineering "summer camp" as a 8th grader (about 14) at Michigan Technological University. It was mostly geared towards fun applications of things and not the math/calculation part of it. Unfortunately, as you've found out, many programs are going to be pretty lightweight.
However, John Hopkins University has put together a decent list of summer programs for people about your age. http://cty.jhu.edu/imagine/linka4.htm
Many of them don't require US citizenship because they aren't funded by USgovernment money. The Penn Summer Science Academy has a set for Experimental Physics which could be interesting.
My best advice would be to email the contact people and explain what you are looking for, focusing on what your experience is and your desired challenge level. Ask them if they think their program would be a good fit.
If you want to do just one course for three weeks, find out if you're eligible for CTY, which does do an international talent search, though you may be too late for Summer 2012
It's really too bad that it no longer exists, but back when I was in high school (71-74), there was a great National Science Foundation program. The program invited science-oriented HS kids for 2-4 weeks (?) to programs on college campuses. It was like summer camp, but educational.
I went to a chemistry program at University of North Dakota and a electrical engineering one at University of Southern California. The programs were relatively inexpensive and there was scholarship money available to offset tuition and meals.
This was back in the days of the cold war and flush science spending. I'm sure a number of graduates of these programs went onward to great science & engineering achievements.
I'd bet that a number of older /. readers participated in these programs -- don't know when they were discontinued.
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe. What are you going to want to do next summer, go to summer camp in North Korea?
To learn about the USA, and make up his own mind. Then he can return to Europe, and be pleased with what he has, but see what should be improved.
(I visited the USA when I was 14, with my parents. We did a massive 8000km road trip. This is said so often by Europeans that it's a cliché: it was a great place to visit, but I don't want to live there.)
I might be completely off-base here but, at 14, It seems that you already spend more than fair share of your time on these "tech" pursuits (you already know a lot of programming languages and have interests in physics and math). I have been on that path before - pursuing purely tech/geek oriented tasks and activities. My suggestion is to go for something that's completely tangential to your personality, something out of your comfort zone - it'll expand your horizons and challenge you in a way that'll continue to benefit you throughout your life. I would highly recommend ballroom dancing (or salsa for that matter) - it's a highly social activity, you interact a lot with the members of opposite sex and you learn dancing too [trust me, it comes in handy when going out clubbing in college :D]. Other options include painting and learning a new musical instrument.
I actually kind of have to agree. You've stated you know a bunch of programming language already, which tells me that you really don't need "camp" to help you learn something that a book will. If you are being forced to choose a camp to go to by the paternal units, do something different.
See the above post. NASA has nothing to do with Space Camp.
When I was younger, during the summers between junior high and high school, I used to go to iD tech camps. I went to the one on the Stanford campus specifically. While there, I got to meet other kids interested in the same things as myself, and I got to go through some short, week long programming language crash courses. If I remember correctly, iD taught me Java, C++, and C#. They had other courses besides programming, such as video editting, and web page design. It was a lot of fun and I would definitely recommend it to others!
hey!
In the summer of '87, just before I graduated high school, I was among a small group of students chosen to spend a week in a computer science summer camp run by Stuart Reges at Stanford. The lectures were all across the board, a smattering of a lot of stuff. We had a lab of Mac 512Ke computers (and a Mac Plus fileserver) on which we learned the basics of Lisp, and there was a networking lecture which posed the Two Generals' Problem, and a lecture on artificial intelligence gave us the Muddy Children Puzzle, and we got to learn Emacs on the school's VAX running VMS, and we got a glimpse of X windows running on a Sun workstation, and I remember a night in an auditorium where we got to see an Amiga use its 4096-color palette to display photorealistic images!
But the most important thing I learned that week - the thing that I've carried with me all the years since then - is that there are *other people like me*. I was a geek in an athletic high school. I was the kid who got beat up and picked on. I was told I had no future because I spent my free time disassembling Apple II games and figuring out how they worked instead of kicking a football. And I believed it - until the day I arrived at that Stanford camp and found other kids who did this sort of stuff, and built robots at home, and memorized pi to a hundred digits, and knew magic tricks, and had a whole bunch of other neat things in their heads which today seem stereotypically nerdy but, back then, the important thing is that none of them involved kicking a football, and these kids were *proud* of who they were and what they could do.
It was only a week. I could say that week changed my life, but it would be more accurate to say that, without it, I might not be here today.
New Mexico Tech has a set of summer camps. nmt.edu
They're all engineering/science/computer related. I'd chuck my kids off there, if I had them, without any reservations.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Yeah. Go hike around the Alps or something. As the years roll by, you'll look back on that sort of experience more fondly than a summer spent coding.
It's slightly off-topic, so pardon this, but many of the Slashdot readers are also atheists, freethinkers, etc.
There is an international network of summer camps called Camp Quest (www.CampQuest.org), and they teach about science, peer review, skepticism, evolution... plus all your traditional camp activities like hiking, arts and crafts, campfires, etc.
There's about a dozen locations in the US, including two in California, plus three overseas.
-David
At that age I remember having a great time at summer computer camp in Vermont (2 weeks sleep away) in the early/mid 80's. I had the best time doing the non-computer things (like sailing on Lake Champlain), but I always did as many computer related activities/classes as I could. We got to use the newest Commodore CBM with Pascal! As an advanced class I also learned Fortran on the big IBM (System/34 I think). I don't use the old programming languages any more, but I'm still happy to take out a sail boat!
If you're going to visit the USA I think you should focus on non-computer activities. Like visiting the great national parks, such as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and a hundred others that are unique to America. Spend time programming nearer to home. You can always play with a computer in a windowless closet anywhere!
Well, the USSRC say "The USSRC, NASA's first visitor center, opened in 1970 and has served over 12 million visitors to date." and that's where Space Camp is held, in "NASA's first visitor center". Also in the film I watched on the Space Camp website attendees had NASA badges on their suits. Lastly the USSRC "houses NASA's Educator Resource Center" ...
So it seems they have something to do with it; but sure as anything they don't run it.
My honest advice, is to get a fucking life. Seriously, get away from the computer this whole summer and meet new people, socialise, have some fun, do some normal teenage things, drink beer, get laid, go travelling, teach English, whatever. Just stay away from the fucking computer and other geeks and nerds. In twenty years' time, you'll either thank me for this, or regret the day you signed up for summer camp 2012.
When I was 14, the only kind of camp I was interested in was one with hot girls. That isn't going to be a tech camp...
I attended the iD tech camp at the University of Minnesota when I was like 10 or 11. It was one of the funnest camps I've ever been to and really sparked my interest in computers and science. I'd recommend them because the iD program is nationwide and all their camps are really fun.
I used to work at the Institute for Quantum Computing (http://iqc.uwaterloo.ca) in Waterloo, ON, Canada.
They offer a summer program called QCSYS for deserving high school students. You should check it out: http://iqc.uwaterloo.ca/conferences/qcsys2012
why do you even let what other people do in their own free time bother you?
I disagree. Camps are a about a lot more than just learning material - there is a huge social interaction component that goes along with them that you're just not going to get on a summer job. And frankly, the social skills are the more important aspect of the program than the academic material for many of the participants (myself having been one of them.)
I strongly recommend:
http://youthprograms.mtu.edu/explorations.php
Summer Youth Programs at Michigan Tech University. I suppose it's been 16 years since I've been, but they were excellent then and a quick perusal of their site leads me to believe they are excellent now, especially if you're interested in Engineering.
There are just not many opportunities for High School students to get exposure to real engineering, but this program definitely offers them.
Oh, and there are girls there.
Anyway, I went 2 or 3 summers and always had a great time. It's not just tech class stuff, there's a strong social program associated with it as well.
Great for those of you who are in HS, and those of you who now have HS-aged children yourselves. I'm honestly not aware of another program in the US like it.
I also did the Illinois Math and Science Academy program as an incoming freshmen or sophomore (it's been a while), but their program focuses more on straight math/science and not so much on practical engineering application, so I definitely preferred Tech. Then again, I don't remember much from the IMSA camp other than the girls and the pinball machine (much time spent on both, although probably more on the pinball machine) so take that as you will. Depending on your age, you could do both; IMSA as an incoming Freshman and Michigan Tech after that.
One other difference is the IMSA program was loaded with a lot more math/science nerds (I recognized a lot of people at IMSA from math competitions), while Tech had a more well-rounded group of people and programs (a lot of participants are Tech alum who just think it's a good idea to get their kids exposed to engineering), so I also liked Tech as an opportunity to work on social skills with non-nerds in a low-pressure environment (nobody knows you when you start and you're leaving in a week or two, so no permanent damage) - and I needed the practice.
Oh, one more I did:
http://engage.illinois.edu/entry/5785
Now called "Exploring Your Options", back in my day it was S.I.T.E., student introduction to engineering. I was pretty sure at that point I was going to Illinois though (summer prior to senior year) so it was double-helpful for me in just learning the engineering department and campus, and a lot of the people I met in the camp ended up attending Illinois as well so it was a leg up on meeting people. I'd say this is a good program if you're a Senior and did the others, but if I was picking ONE, I'd still probably go with Michigan Tech. IMSA vs. UofI will just depend on age. I think the UofI program would have been less interesting if I were not already sure I were goingto UofI.
Caveat: I was in high school 16-20 years ago, so my info is a bit dated. :)
paintball
OR if you can't get a job and want to go to the US, contact the people at NYC Resistor, the New York Hackerspace. Just tell them you are interested in those things, you'd like to come and hang around for two weeks around people with similar interests who actually do something with them, and you need a couch to crash on. I'm pretty sure it's going to be a cheaper, more interesting and more educational alternative to a summer camp.
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