School of Education Offers Summer Camp for the Mind: [unit], Indiana University at Bloomington

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Last Updated: Thu, Jun 7, 2007

School of Education Offers Summer Camp for the Mind

Young Scholars SMARTS Camp will hold two sessions in June.

Building robots made from Legos and exploring underwater creatures are among the things students can explore during the Young Scholars’ SMARTS Camp sponsored by the IU School of Education at IUPUI. Participants in grades 1-9 can attend either or both sessions on June 18-22 and June 25-29.

The camp started in 1982 as a program for gifted and talented students, but it’s now open to all. “It’s for anybody that has a real desire to learn something new and different,” said Beth Pickard, camp director and a faculty member in the School of Education and School of Music at IUPUI. Pickard says the camp is known for using a variety of methods to help students learn concepts. As proof, she keeps a “marshmallow catapult” on her desk, a memento given by past campers.

Pickard and her staff, which includes professors from across the IUPUI campus and schoolteachers from around the area, focus on using unique methods to help campers better understand and enjoy what they are studying in school. “I ask my teachers to do something with the kids that they would probably not do in the regular classroom,” Pickard said. “Don’t make it an extension of school; make it an enrichment of school.” The enrichment process focuses on key aspects of scholastic work. “SMARTS” is an acronym for “science, math, arts, reading, technology, and sports.”

The classes are divided, with 1st and 2nd grades, 3rd and 4th grades, 5th and 6th grades making up three groups. The fourth group of 7th, 8th, and 9th graders will participate in a new addition to the program, the “Whaz UP!” internship and multimedia project. The program is the summer component to the IUPUI partnership with the Crispus Attucks Medical Magnet High School. Campers get to know more about the schools at IUPUI who are part of the partnership and what they teach. Aside from the School of Education, the schools of dentistry, nursing, health and rehabilitation, and informatics are involved. “Our first day each week we’ll be visiting all four schools just to kind of get an overview, and then the students will pick a school that they want to spend the rest of the week with,” Pickard said.

More information is available on the YSP SMARTS Camp website at http://education.iupui.edu/soe/outreach/young/index.aspx. For questions, e-mail yscholars@iupui.edu, or phone 317-278-4528.

Media Outlets: the following comments are available as mp3 files on the IU School of Education Website at http://education.indiana.edu/audio.html .

Pickard describes what kinds of campers should attend the SMARTS Camp:
“It’s for anybody that wants to learn, anybody that has a real desire to learn something new and different, something that probably isn’t in the classroom. We came up with the idea of SMARTS Camp because we say, ‘this is gonna make you smart.’ You don’t have to be smart to come, just come and get smart. And SMARTS stands for science, math, arts, reading, technology and sports.”

Pickard says part of the goal for the “Whaz UP?” classes for 7th, 8th, and 9th graders is to expose them to the Crispus Attucks partner schools at IUPUI—the schools of dentistry, nursing, health and rehabilitation, informatics, as well as the school of education:
“The basic goal is just to get them to these schools, have them realize that they’re not a scary place, that they’re a place where people care, and people are excited about having them want to know about the school.”

Pickard says teachers won’t be conducting classes just like during the school year:
“I ask my teachers to do something with the kids that they would probably not do in the regular classroom. Don’t make it an extension of school; make it an enrichment of school. And we have a lot of resources here at the School of Education and at the university that we can use to make those things come true. A lot of our teachers have been with us forever because they love doing this, because it’s a total different feeling than the classroom.”

For More Information, Contact:
Chuck Carney
Director of Communications and Media Relations
Office: (812) 856-8027
ccarney@indiana.edu