February 18th, 2019
It is Fab-ruary, and the love of building things is in the air! I hope you all had a wonderful Valentines day, and that you are looking forward to the upcoming spring! Spring is a time to look ahead at the promise of the year, and we are here with good tidings of things to come.
First off, in a wild fit of sanity, we have posted our summer camps for 2019! There have been some changes in how we run our camps, but our focus on hands-on learning will remain the same. We will still have morning and afternoon camps, but we have condensed them into an all-ages experience. That means that older campers will have a more challenging version of the camp. Also due to space constraints, we are limiting our camps to 20 kids per camp, so sign up early to reserve your spot! Morning camps will all be computer based. We will be bringing back the popular Minecraft Camp from last year, but are adding a roblox series of camps (teaching game mechanics and design), a scratch camp (to teach coding basics and intermediate computer programming), and a YouTuber series. This will show kids what goes into becoming a YouTuber, from the scripting, to the filming, editing, uploading, and trending. If your kid wants to be a YouTuber when they grow up, this is their chance to learn the nuts and bolts. (Pro Tip: a 10 minute video is around 15 to 20 hours of work. Your kids will find out that it is not as easy as it looks. You are welcome.) If you do sign up for the YouTube camps, please be aware that your child WILL be making and POSTING a YouTube video that will be ON THE INTERNET. If you are uncomfortable with that, this camp is not for you.
The afternoon camps will have everything from Superhero Physics to zombie survival. We will explore the depths of space, build in the woodshop, create robots, and discover the world of hands-on science! All of the details are on our webpage, and you can sign up now! There is also early drop off, and late pick up options, so you can turn our camps into a full day extravaganza of making! We start the week after school ends, and go until the day before school starts, so busy parents have an option for that ‘dead zone’ week on either side.
The second excitement comes in a letter delivered by owl. March will be our Harry Potter Month at the Fab Lab, and we have a full series of classes planned which are themed on the Harry Potter universe. Make a sorting hat, create a Time-Turner for yourself, knit a fashionable hat (intermediate to advanced knitting), make a wand, and join us for our Harry Potter end-of-month party, where you can show off all of your muggle-made goodies and meet the other potter-heads! Details will be coming up faster than a Nimbus 2000, so like us on Facebook, Instagram, and sign up for our email list for all of the latest news.
Beyond Harry Potter month and summer camps, we still have even more things going on at the Fab Lab, and we are looking for ways to help out the community. If you have an idea for a worthy cause that could use our help (Building shelves, designing storage, upgrading spaces, or even creating custom gifts for donors), we would love to reach out and help them. The Fab Lab is here to help others achieve great things, and helping our fellow non-profits and our community is one of the ways we fulfill our need to serve.
Thank you all for your support, and we hope to see you soon at the Fab Lab!
Kirk Cheyney