Summer STEAM Program

STEAM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math

Experience our STEAM* tasting menu for hungry brains through Coding, Design-Thinking, 3D Printing, Inventing DIY Bots, and Fabricating Creative Machines during our week long summer program. We’re creating a special set of daily fun maker adventures. 

Monday: Creative Coding
Explore the possibilities in creative programming. We kickoff with a physical activity to explore and embody key programming ideas. We will then dive into Scratch. While encountering beginner coding frameworks, we will ask questions about how to design digital games by understanding systems and pushing your own artistic voice. The second half will dive into the basics of HTML and CSS while making custom web pages to showcase the digital games each young maker developed for family and friends to play test from home.

Tuesday: Programming with Physical Objects
Discover the animating world of sensors, motors, and microcontrollers with LEGO Wedo. The first half focuses on engineering simple robots. The second half challenges everyone to combine bots into a larger Rube Goldberg Machine.

Wednesday: Invention & Design-Thinking
Constructively question the world around you. Your chair, phone, pencil… every thing is how someone chose to design it.  How would you design things differently? The first half will challenge you to engineer new forms for music instruments using the Makey Makey, sound recording software, and various provided materials. The second half will challenge you to prototype a Go-Go-Gadget glove (or other bionic armor) using basic electronic parts.  

Thursday: 3D Modeling & Printing
How would you design your own custom Monopoly game piece? toy figurine? scenery? The first part will jump into 3D modeling software by creating dice for a DIY board game. The second part will challenge you to design and 3D print your own game character for a board game. By the end, we’ll try everyone’s game pieces out on a unique board game at The Makery. Want a custom game character?  Just design and print one. Take what you make home with you.   

Friday: DIY Electronics
Get your hands dirty soldering and building your own gadgets. Imagine a “smart” object and engineer it. We’ll introduce paper circuits and a variety of materials to construct switches and add interactivity to your imagined device.  We will collaboratively construct a “sensing” table that responds to or energizes your smart object. The second half we’ll be soldering together a functioning electronic Simon Says Game with cushy buttons. Invent it, build it, test it, play with it, and take it home.

Please bring your own laptop.

Choose from any of the 5 workshops, or register for just 3 workshops, or for full week.

After exposure to key concepts, students will have free exploration time to experiment with their own ideas supported by technical mentoring from our workshop leaders. All our workshop class sizes are small, enabling meaningful 1:1 coaching and self-paced discoveries.