We provide great starter projects to get your campers into making, creating, crafting, coding, and more this summer, along with background on how to lead these projects with your campers to develop their Maker mindset and support them through their making process.
The design of your camp experience becomes your own giant Maker project! Design your paths through this summer’s projects as you go, with six starter projects from our Start Making! book and many different project choices building on those skills and techniques, depending on where you want to take your making this summer.
Try your favorite projects, develop your campers’ skills and techniques further, and change up the materials or mash-up the different projects however you like. You might make paper circuits, sound-making devices, and giant cardboard structures along three different paths, so why not combine them all to make your structure light up and make some noise?
We’re mashing things up too in the design of this summer’s project paths. For each path, you’ll find a starter project, along with many fun projects from Make: and DK books, our past years’ Maker Camp favorites, and cool things Makers are doing on Makezine.com. You’ll also find many great tips, tricks, and reflection prompts – just look for Makey with a speech bubble.
Project Paths
Join us here at makercamp.com to explore a new project every day. Get an overview about the project in our daily video playlist. Follow links to work on projects at home.
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Maker Camp affiliates host physical campsites where campers work with other kids and adults to guide you. Affiliates can be Boys & Girls Clubs, community centers, makerspaces, and much more!
Find a campsiteGet your feet wet as you get inspired by what Makers do, and play around with the stuff, tools, and ways of making.
Our cool and fun step-by-step projects branch out from the theme. Advanced Makers can take on our Camp Challenges.
Share what you’ve done online. Meet up in real life with our end-of-week showcases. Or connect cabin-to-cabin with other Maker Campers.
We host content online, but you can meet your neighbors who are taking part in Maker Camp, too, at local campsites worldwide!
Many libraries, makerspaces, and community centers are hosting Maker Camp for the kids in their communities!
has been with Maker Camp since it began in 2012. She is our Maker Camp Affiliate Liaison.
calls herself a Jill of all trades, a maker, tinkerer, artist, crafter who loves drawing comics, reading comics and can cook like a mad scientist. She knows a little bit about a lot of things! When she’s not hanging with Maker Camp, you can find her playing at the Maker Media Labs where she is the Project Editor.
comes back as our co-host or “Camp Director” for Maker Camp. When he’s not expressing his love of tiny electric cars through the Power Racing Series (www.powerracingseries.org) event (which he co-founded), he designs for Make: Magazine. His life is defined by three B’s: Bikes, Burgers, Battlestar Galactica.
joins as our Head of Production for Maker Camp. She’s a lifelong Maker who spent most of her career at Pixar. She’s also worked at several startups, including videogames, hardware, and health/wellness.
sits in the back of the Maker Camp Mess Hall making a mess with the projects. She also gets behind the wheel of the imaginary Maker Camp van to steer some of the content and programming with Kelli. She brings over two decades of experience in children’s programs and publications to our campfire circle.
comes back as our co-host or “Camp Director” for Maker Camp. She first heard of Make when they sponsored a Rube Goldberg competition at her school and has been hooked on creating and building ever since. She is currently studying Robotics Engineering at UC Santa Cruz where she gets to code, build and create endlessly.
brings her extensive workshop, electronics, programming, design time, and experience with kids to her first summer at Maker Camp, where she appears as the hand inside Rebecca Raptor. She hails from San Diego where she’s majoring in UCSD’s Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts program with a minor in Business. Aside from making art with code, she also loves to work with paint, clay, and papier-mâché.
knows her way around a woodshop, a metal shop, and even a foundry. Since being a part of Maker Camp in the summer of 2015, she spent some time off from being a student in Stanford’s Product Design program to teach STEAM classes in local elementary and middle school makerspaces in her hometown of Los Angeles.
