Houston area students ages 7 to 17 will attend the UH’s Computer Camps, a series of week-long camps hosted by iD Tech Camps, to teach children the essentials of programming and design.
“We are the leading summer STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program. What’s great about it is it’s not like a regular camp where you set your kids off at the end of the week, they’re done and that’s it,” said Karen Thurm Safran, vice president of marketing and business development with iD.
“We inspire kids to keep learning and taking what they love to do, and showing them the passion and turn it into something much more, like a college degree or a career.”
iD began in 1999 in California’s Silicon Valley, and now is held at more than 60 universities nationwide, including Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and MIT. This will be the program’s eighth year with UH.
Safran said the environment encourages kids to attend a university after high school and pursue a career after graduation.
“The camps are reaching a broad audience of kids, showing them that they can get involved with this and make it a career. Over the next 10 years, there will be over one million jobs that will be unfilled in STEM and coding,” Safran said.
“It’s a wonderful way to not only have students who will be immersed in what they love and get into a career that they absolutely love doing, but they will be going into a career that’s very lucrative and be able to get a job after college.”
The program at UH offers class in programming in scratch, Java, C++ and in game design in the RPG Maker, iPhone, iPad, Minecraft and the Unreal Development Kit. The teachers consist of college students and graduate students with experience in STEM.
“I think it’s better that they’re receiving the option to get into technology at an early age. I sure wish I had the option to get a better in-depth understanding of computers and how they work when I was younger,” said chemistry and computer science sophmore Martín Réyes.
The camps began June 10 and will conclude on July 26.
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