STEAM CAMP as Professional Development - Part 2

In my last post, I described the framework I use in my integrated STEAM-inspired residencies to design a one-week STEAM camp in rural Vermont. The INSPIRE phase let students feel circuits and game design before teaching them the concepts and skills to create their own games. The CREATE CONFIDENCE phase used skill-building sprints to provide them just enough command of real tools and processes available to them to get started designing their own games.

The MEANINGFUL MAKING Phase

The MEANINGFUL MAKING phase is where the students design and create their own games in an open studio format. Here we see creative and practical problem-solving play out as campers created a game prototype that was ready to test, revise, and pitch. Our culminating event included a game arcade with peers and a pitch to guests who role-played "potential investors".

By midweek, the campers were ready for the Meanintful Making phase.  "When can we start creating our own games?" they asked. They were inspired and they had gained enough confidence from the skill-building sprints to dive into creating games using their own ideas.

Scroll through the slides to see the fun games created this week

To my surprise, most of them started designing board games. In some residencies I've seen a strong preference to create physical games; at other times I've seen more students gravitate towards creating video games. I think the choice of medium came down to what they created in the skill-builders. During the laser cutter sprint, the campers ended up with a laser-cut game piece. Holding their beautifully crafted game pieces that they had designed themselves, students had an immediate desire to build a game around it. This led them to imagine board games above video games.

It also really drove home the role of aesthetics in the MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) of game design—a testament to what Ron Berger describes as the power of giving students the opportunity to create "beautiful works." Using Cuttle.xyz and The Noun Project to produce a game piece with the laser cutter gave the students something beautiful that they could touch and feel. Something they had designed. Some students were really motivated to create a game around that piece. Others used the skills they had learned to design different game assets that could be used with the theme their game was based on.

Just in Time Learning during Studio Time

Although we had not covered boolean modifiers like "union" and "subtract" in the laser cutter skill-builder, many students needed this skill to weld parts of their designs together while creating game assets. When one student needed to attach a dog's leg to its body, I showed her how. She immediately turned teacher—showing others how to use "union" to keep their own designs intact. This just-in-time peer teaching spread quickly, and it became one of the most powerful features of open studio time.

Another common element in many of the games our students made was the use of LED lights triggered by copper tape "switches" as part of the game mechanics. Students' use of LED switches in their games echoed what they'd learned in the Simple Circuits and Switches skill-builder—a clear sign that those hands-on sprints built genuine confidence with the tools. In this case, our skill-builder helped students understand at least one way circuits could add to the MDA of game design.

Next time, I'd include an explicit brainstorming session on different ways circuits could enhance game design. It might spark more varied student solutions and help students see possibilities beyond what they experienced in the 45-minute skill-builder.

Balancing Student Vision with Growth

As instructors, our role was to expand student thinking about what's possible beyond the quick skill-builder they experienced. We were constantly looking for opportunities to build on the basic skills when a student's idea provided the perfect opportunity to learn the next level.

This happened when two students imagined a game called Poison Lights that would require 6 switches and simple
circuits—far more than what we'd taught. With the students' foundational understanding of simple circuits, their game would require 6 batteries to control six different switch-light combinations. At first, we tried to convince the students to reduce the number of lights necessary for their game mechanics. After those efforts failed, I leaned into the students' vision and determination, teaching them how to use a negative and positive bus to achieve the results they were seeking.

Using Cuttle to document a multi-light circuit design with a  negative and positive bus 

I was reminded that respecting student vision—and not limiting what's possible to the skills they already possess—is a crucial part of the Meaningful Making stage. This scenario also reminded me that teachers need a chance to play and develop their own advanced skills, so that they can be ready to take students to new levels of learning just in time. This is much more effective than having students sit through many "just-in-case" skill-building sessions before the meaningful making phase begins.

The balance matters. Spending too much time on just-in-case skill-builders reduces open studio time for meaningful making. It's better to save advanced skill-building (like parallel circuits) for when a student's vision makes that lesson the perfect solution to the problem they're trying to solve.

Yet spend too little time on a new skill that has game-changing potential, and you can also limit students' understanding of a tool or process. We saw this play out with the micro:bits.

The Micro:bit Lesson: Coaching as Possibility-Expanding

Each camper was told they could take home their micro:bit at the end of the week—following the UK's pedagogical decision to give each 5th grader their own. The campers were excited, but they needed one-on-one encouragement to think about ways to integrate the micro:bit in their games. The potential of the micro:bit needed further exploration than the time we gave it. Had we had longer than a week, we could have built more confidence with the computer science concepts that make the micro:bit such a powerful tool.

Instead, I used my computer science background to coach students to integrate the micro:bit in doable ways that naturally fit into their designs. The students hadn't built enough confidence to see these possibilities on their own.

Here's an important lesson for facilitators: A good coach doesn't limit their input to answering student requests for help. A good coach looks for ways to help students grow in ways they might not have imagined yet. There is a delicate balance between allowing student voice and offering ideas that help a student accomplish what they hadn't yet imagined was possible.

When one student explained that he wanted the micro:bit to display the name of each player's turn, I suggested a simpler, more flexible solution that was actually codable using the computer concepts the students had learned. "What if every time your turn is done, you press a button, and the micro:bit rotates through an LED graphical display that points to whose turn it is (Player 1, Player 2, Player 3, Player 4)?" Then I paired him up with one of the math teachers in the room and got them started coding this solution. They both came away with pride and  additional confidence with computer science.

Fairy lights controlled by microbit blink when you win.

Another student had designed 4 corner posts for lights he wanted to use in the aesthetics of his game. Although he'd learned that external lights could be controlled with the micro:bit, there wasn't enough time in the week for him to learn all the skills needed to implement his vision. But I quickly thought of a way for him to use the "code a light to blink" skill they'd already practiced, and apply it to a set of fairy lights to add a unique feature to his game. There was just enough time in the week for me to show him how to modify the switch of the fairy light so that the lights could instead be controlled by the programmable pin of the micro:bit.

With just the right amount of coaching, another camper who created a beautifully designed game called A Dog's Life needed some guidance to think of a way that a micro:bit could add random play to her game without sacrificing the stacks of A/B  game cards she'd created. "Remember the dice you coded during the skill-builder?" I asked. "It randomly selected a number between 1 and 6 and displayed dots on the screen. Could you change that code so it tells the player which Card Deck they can pick from (A or B)?"

This was just the right amount of challenge for Lizzie to build on what she'd learned earlier, but apply it to her game aesthetics. But she didn't stop there. She created a fun holder for the micro:bit that matched her game's visual design. This is another example of giving students the opportunity to create beautiful works.

Game aesthetics doesn't always come in visual form. One student was determined to use the micro:bit's ability to play music and composed two different musical loops to fit the theme of his game mechanics.

Resilience and Joy in the Creative Process

Another big win for us happened when a student who had missed most of the camp days came back on the last day. We thought about having him become a co-designer to another student's game in progress, but then we remembered that he'd created a pirate-themed game piece earlier as part of the laser cutter skill-builder. With a little one-on-one coaching from one of the STEAM fellowship educators, he quickly came up with a "doable" but fun, colorful game board that brought lots of joy to his peers.

Problem-solving, testing, revising, perseverance, creative solutions—these became integral parts of open studio time. Watching Piper and another student troubleshoot the circuit design on the back of their Farm Animal Game board, and seeing the pride in their eyes when the light finally lit up after they figured out where the short circuit was and how to fix it—that was priceless.

Sure, there were stressful times where students experienced different phases of the creative process.

But the STEAM fellowship educators were fantastic facilitators who successfully moved each student through each emotion with everyone feeling awesome by the end of camp. This was evident in the joy we watched as campers laughed while playtesting each other's games, and the pride we heard as they pitched their games to our guests role-playing potential investors during our culminating event.

Facilitation and Coaching

The coaching skills that the STEAM Fellowship educators brought to the Meaningful Making time were instrumental to the camp's success. Rather than stepping in to fix a stuck prototype or handing over an answer, they moved table to table asking powerful questions:

What's this mechanic actually doing for the player? Does the theme match the way the game feels to play?

Their questioning pushed students past a working prototype into amazing finished games—"beautiful works" that the students were proud to share.

The STEAM fellowship educators brought more than strategically timed questions to the mix. They understood that physical movement, social time, community circles, and brain breaks were essential ingredients to sustaining creative efforts. Their strong pedagogical skills were evident in painting game boards outside, inventing silly games with hula hoops during brain breaks, or grounding student energy during a community circle. By the end of the week, I was reminded that integrated STEAM-based projects create Maker Empowerment in both students and teachers.

By Friday the campers were ready to playtest their games and get feedback from their peers during our Game Arcade Gallery.  Finally, each camper pitched their game to special guests who role played game investors.  During the pitch, the campers shared how their game best met the MDA of Game Design (Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics). 

Here's What This Means for Your Classroom

You don't need a week-long camp or a room full of maker tools to bring this framework to life. Whether you're integrating game design into a literature unit, using simple circuits in a science project, or building confidence with basic maker tools, the three-phase INSPIRE-CREATE CONFIDENCE-MEANINGFUL MAKING sequence works.

Start small: Pick one skill-builder that gets students' hands on something beautiful—whether that's a paper circuit, a coded micro:bit, or a beautifully designed game tile. Let them hold it. Feel the weight of their own creation. Then step back and watch what they imagine building around it.

And remember: Your role as facilitator is not to have all the answers. It's to ask the questions that push students past "it works" into "it's beautiful and purposeful." The coaching questions that emerged in our camp—What's this mechanic actually doing for the player? Does the theme match the way the game feels to play?—are portable. Use them. Ask them while you're sitting alongside a student, not standing at the front.

The joy and maker empowerment we witnessed this summer wasn't magic. It used a simple  framework, some thoughtful facilitation, and the decision to respect student vision while believing in their capacity to grow beyond what they thought was possible.

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Maker Empowerment as defined by Harvard Project Zero: Agency of Design. https://pz.harvard.edu/projects/agency-by-design

Many thanks to VREC (Vermont Rural Education Collaborative) and North Country Encore for growing the capacity to create, inclination to make, and sensitivity to the design of STEAM integrated learning in our schools by embedding professional development (STEAM fellowship) into a STEAM-based summer camp. I look forward to seeing how our STEAM educators bring the joy of learning through creating and making back to their classrooms during the 2026-2027 school year.

STEAM CAMP As Professional Development

In a recent blog post, I reflected on the adoption of both the MAKER MOVEMENT and  STEAM in our schools.  I noticed that while the maker movement in our schools bubbled up from curious, creative teachers who saw making as a way to engage students with hands-on, minds-on learning, STEAM  mostly came down from school leadership looking for a framework that connected to content areas such as Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics.  

Both approaches reveal that our hands and our brains are interconnected, and sometimes,  our hands know before our brain does.  This week I got the chance to see this phenomenon in action during the design of a STEAM summer camp for 5th and 6th graders from the NCSU Encore program.   VREC (Vermont Rural Education Collaborative) offered STEAM fellowships to four educators interested in learning how they might bring STEAM into their own practice --and what resulted was a week filled with joyful, powerful learning by both teachers and students. 

It’s easy to imagine joy in summer camp, but the same joy can (and should) be part of learning throughout the school year. This week gave me a chance to model how game design with STEAM supplies and maker tools can bring joy to learning while naturally connecting to nearly any curricular area. Tweak the prompt slightly, and students could be designing games that reinforce curricular concepts in social studies, literacy, science or math.

Why game design? Obviously, games have a built-in fun factor. Also, kids are already game experts! Combining something they know well (game creation) and new content knowledge can increase the stickiness of all types of new curricular concepts. Game design is also a great vehicle for bringing in the Gold Standards of Project-Based Learning. - a sound pedagogical approach for teaching and learning. And when you combine game design with STEAM supplies and maker tools such as circuits, 3D printers, laser cutters, and cardboard cutters, you can create a culture of craftsmanship where the students create what Ron Berger (An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students) calls “beautiful works”. So stick with me over the next couple of blog posts as we explore how game design can be used to transform most any curricular content into a joyful learning experience where the students own their learning with pride in their eyes. 

During the week-long summer camp, I used the same sequence I use across my CREATE MAKE LEARN school-based residencies. We started the Inspire, Create Confidence, and Meaningful Making sequence with the essential question "How might we INSPIRE our students and CREATE CONFIDENCE our teachers and students need to MAKE SOMETHING MEANINGFUL?" 

During part 1 of this blog post series, I’ll share how we used the first two phases (INSPIRE)  and (CREATE CONFIDENCE) in our learning design, while the next blog post will pick up with what happens when students take everything from these first two phases and use it for MEANINGFUL MAKING and build something they are inspired to make.

Phase 1: Inspire

Even before the first tool came out, the Inspire phase did the important work of creating motivation needed to engage campers into the learning they would do this week.  We opened Day 1 with introductions and creative light-up name tags where campers built their first circuit.

The STEAM Fellowship educators who joined the camp brought their own middle-grades pedagogical toolkit with them. They quickly arranged a circle of chairs in the room that could host a morning meeting, and that same circle formation returned throughout the week at transitions, after lunch, and again to close each day, often with a quick grounding game that got students physically and mentally re-centered before the next activity started. The circle scaffolded relationships and belonging. They were short, but purposeful. I loved learning new prompts that the STEAM fellowship educators brought to the circle each day.

We quickly moved outside for a "Four Corners: Game Edition" icebreaker where students physically sorted themselves by the kind of game they like most: physical, tabletop, video, or card games.  Not only did this take advantage of the beautiful Vermont summer weather we were lucky enough to experience, it also served as a preview of the different types of games we would be creating this week and that the week would engage both our minds and our bodies. 

While outside, we quickly moved into an outdoor cat-and-mouse physical game built with the use of Makey Makey circuits. Students were inspired by playing a physical game where they got to run around, trigger switches using conductive and insulating objects to reach one of two cheese buckets.  This reminded students of the role of conductors and insulators in circuit design without sitting through a review lecture. 

We started with these game rules, but eventually modified them a bit to fit the dynamics of our group. 

• Your team huddles near its home (Start Zone) 

• Pick 1 person to be your cat. The cat will guard the Danger Zone.
  The rest of you will be mice and huddle in the Start Zone 

• When the Game Master signals “Go,” one person from your team will race towards the cheese.  They must cross the Danger Zone without being caught/tagged by the cat to land in the Safety Zone.  If that cat catches you, you become a cat for the team that catches you. 

• Once in the Safety Zone, they must use an object they find here to access the cheese without stepping into the No Trespassing Zone. 

• When you successfully make contact with the cheese container, causing a successful signal to sound, the game master will give you a piece of cheese point.

• REPEAT until all the mice have a chance to try crossing the cheese.  In the last round, the original cat can become a mouse so they get the final turn. 

PreGame Setup by facilitatorrs: 

It required a little setup ahead of time, but it turned out to be a very engaging way to introduce the MAKEY MAKEY Circuit board with lots of movement.   We connected the Makey Makey UP arrow to a metal "cheese bucket" and the DOWN arrow to a plastic cheese bucket filled with water.  (This allowed us to introduce the concept of 'water' as a conductor as well as metal.)   We then connected a metal pole held up by plastic chairs to EARTH on the Makey Makey.   A ScoreBoard Scratch program was loaded onto the computer. 

** Note: if you notice unexpected behavior from your Makey Makey when set up outside, it might be caused by the ground you are standing on. Put insulating cardboard under the metal bucket. Note that our chairs had a built-in insulator since they were made of plastic. 

Phase 2: Create Confidence

Inspiration creates the want. Next phase - Create Confidence. The Create Confidence phase runs on short, deliberately incomplete lessons in the form of 30 - 45 minute Skill Builders focused on creating confidence with one new tool or process, no attempt at full mastery. A Skill Builder isn't trying to teach everything about a laser cutter or a circuit board. It's trying to get a student to the point of "I understand enough about this that I could keep learning it on my own or with a mentor  whenever I need to." That's a very different goal than competence — it's a foothold, not a finish line, and it's what lets a student walk into the meaningful making projects later with the confidence to try using unfamiliar tools. 

On Day 1, we started building confidence with circuits using Makey Makey and FunKey circuit boards.

This first skill builder activity was meant to create a quick win as students plugged their circuit board into their Chromebooks and created game controllers from playdough and other materials.

We looked at different "Cat and Mouse" video games created with Scratch, and selected this one as a test for our first game controller.   Using video games created with Scratch to test our game controllers allowed the campers to see the connection between computer science and game design.  We could quickly "look inside" at the code used to create each game. 

The campers made their first game controller using play dough, then quickly experimented with other materials. 

We then gave campers the challenge of creating a prototype for a retro "Scrappy Joystick". Some used Scratch projects to test their joysticks while others preferred the Makey Makey Selfie-arcade games. 

Our goal for Day 2 was to CREATE CONFIDENCE with simple circuits,  the laser cutter, and a new circuit board called micro:bit .  We also introduced the MDA of Game Mechanics and focused on TableTop games. 

 

Following our desire to keep campers moving, we introduced the MDA of Game Design with an outdoor game of THIS or THAT.  In our morning circle, we asked campers to name their favorite tabletop game. This list was used to feed the first round of our THIS or THAT tournament, where campers voted on which game had the best Game Mechanics. The beautiful summer weather allowed us to hold the tournament outside and vote with our feet.  The second round asked students to decide which game had the best Game Dynamics, and the last round focused on Game Aesthetics. 

Once back inside, the students rotated between three Create Confidence skill builders.  STEAM fellowship educators also got the opportunity to learn from or practice facilitating skill builders.  I especially loved the powerful questioning techniques that our STEAM fellows used to deepen the learning for our campers. 

The  Micro:bit Skill Builder  created confidence with a student-friendly circuit board called Micro:bits. The campers were excited to learn that they would be able to keep their new micro:bit circuit board. We used a MakeCode micro:bit tutorial to turn their micro:bit into a dice.  This introduced campers to several important computer science concepts including VARIABLES, RANDOM, and LOGIC. 

The  Laser Cutter Skill Builder created confidence with using Cuttle.xyz to design assets for our game pieces.  First, the students learned how to create a hexagon game tile as a way to familiarize themselves with the process of creating an svg file. They also practiced our method for sending files to the Glowforge laser cutter.  They also learned how to use Cuttle.xyz to turn an SVG graphic from the Noun Project into a game piece. See my post on why I think Cuttle.xyz  is a game changer for students creating with maker tools like laser cutters, Cricut and other cutters, and even 3D printers. 

The  Simple Circuits Skill Builder created confidence with building circuits and switches that turned LED lights off and on.  Students used hexagon tiles they cut from the laser cutter and copper tape to create their switches. We also brainstormed how circuits and switches might be used in game mechanics.   

On the morning of Day 3 we offered a couple more advanced skill builders using the micro:bits.  One skill builder taught the students how to use the built-in radio of the micro:bit to send data to another micro:bit on the same channel.  The students enjoyed coding different features like sound alerts into their micro chat programs.  The second skill builder demonstrated how to control external components with the micro:bits.  Both of these skills could expand the potential of the micro:bits to be used in game design. 

The confidence created with these skill builders became obvious as the campers started asking, “When can we start building our own game?” We circled up again with a prompt, "How might you use what you learned this week to design a game that uses circuits in at least one way?" and sent them out to brainstorm during an outdoor reflection time. By the afternoon of Day 3, the students were ready for a MEANINGFUL MAKING challenge.

Although neither the Inspire nor Create Confidence phase asks students to make anything of their own yet, these first two phases provided students with two key ingredients -- inspiration or motivation and confidence or foundational skills that would lead to craftsmanship and more ideas as they prepared to brainstorm creating something original.

If you skip the Inspire phase, the Skill Builders become just another rotation of disconnected tech demos, with no throughline for why any of it matters. If you skip the Create Confidence phase, the open-ended Meaningful Making phase turns into enthusiasm with nowhere productive to go, because nobody has enough command of the actual tools to act on their ideas.

Put them together, in sequence, and something different happens: a student walks into an open-ended challenge already believing two things at once — this is worth doing, and I have what I need to start. That's the setup for Phase 3: Meaningful Making. Stay tuned for Part 2 -blog post to see the process and Game prototypes our campers made this week during their Meaningful Making studio time.