This past July, LSG met two awesome groups of young neurodivergent campers at Explora, and it was another successful summer camp in the books! Each year’s camp has built beautifully upon the last and brought its own innovations to the content and structure of what the kiddos learn. For the theme this year, we journeyed into quite a vast universe – in fact, general belief is that we know less about it on average than we do outer space. Yes, our campers got to be ocean explorers, and they dove into several fascinating topics: the zones of the ocean, coral reefs, clean vs. polluted water, and more. As I’ve observed in previous years, the kiddos were very involved in the lessons and activities as they got to harness their creative energy. For example, the campers got to construct their own coral reef structures with materials like clay, bottle corks, and pipe cleaners. For my own part, I got to present a lesson about plastic pollution in our oceans, which incorporated a read-along video of a children’s book and reusing pieces of plastic bottles to create a lei (the book from the video was set in Hawai’i).
Another addition to this year’s event was a very useful program called ClassDojo, which can keep track of the group members, their parents or guardians, points awarded to them, and more. From that point system, we had many prizes to offer the kids: animal toys, bubble machines, and extra time with the various sensory bins we had for break time. Then, there were many hands-on opportunities for the kiddos, like when they had “Explore Explora” time and visited the different areas of the museum: Sound, Electricity, and even Bubbles! Also, a team of co-designers dropped by the camp and presented “Makey Makey” tools, with which you can create makeshift game controllers out of items you wouldn’t expect, like clay and cardboard. These are still very functional controllers hooked up to circuitry equipment, and the co-designers connected them to a set of laptops so the campers could have fun times with games like Flappy Bird and Geometry Dash.
With all these innovative activities and approaches for the 2024 camp, it goes to show how this kind of event will keep developing. One of the major implications is that LSG’s relationship with Explora is evolving. Our team plans to expand these camps to other age groups in the future; we are currently working on one for the upcoming Winter Break, with bilingual instruction. Quite simply, the LSG/Explora summer camp continues to change for the better each year, and it’s always a great experience. I remain excited for how the team will approach this event in years to come and keep building memorable opportunities for our young scientists out there.
Until the next story,
Aaron Kelly Anderson
a.k.a. “A PhD on the Spectrum”
