Why we built camp this way

Active learning

The strongest evidence behind our design concerns active learning: students working through problems rather than watching someone explain them. A 2014 meta-analysis in PNAS pooled 225 studies of university science and mathematics teaching and found that active approaches improved exam performance and substantially reduced failure rates compared with lecturing.

What it does not say: this was undergraduate coursework, not children at summer camp. We take it as strong support for a general principle.

Source. Freeman, S. et al. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. PNAS, 111(23).

At camp. There is no lecture block. Campers are building within fifteen minutes of arriving, every day.

Attempting before being taught

Manu Kapur’s work on productive failure asks students to attempt a problem before being taught how to solve it. Their first attempts usually fall short. Across a series of classroom studies, those students went on to understand the underlying concepts better than students taught the method first, even though the taught group looked better in the moment.

An important qualification, and one we take seriously: this is not the same as leaving children to flounder. In the studies, students are supported throughout and the instruction still arrives. The sequence is what changes.

Source. Kapur, M. (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and Instruction, 26(3), and subsequent work.

At camp. Campers try the challenge before anyone demonstrates a technique, with a counselor beside them the whole time. We let the first tower fall over. We do not let anybody sit in front of a pile of cardboard feeling stupid.

Guided play

Guided play sits between free play and direct instruction. An adult sets a goal and shapes the environment, and the child directs their own exploration within it. Reviews of the evidence suggest this combination often outperforms both free play and instruction alone for younger children, because it keeps the child’s sense of agency while still pointing somewhere useful.

What it does not say: that adults should stand back and say nothing. The guidance is the active ingredient.

Source. Weisberg, D. S., Hirsh-Pasek, K., and Golinkoff, R. M. (2013). Guided play: where curricular goals meet a playful pedagogy. Mind, Brain, and Education, 7(2).

At camp. Counselors are trained to answer a stuck camper with a question first. "What happened right before it fell?" does more than taking over, though sometimes taking over briefly is exactly right, and we train for that judgment too.

Working together

Decades of research on cooperative learning find that students pursuing a shared goal generally achieve more, and report better relationships with peers, than students working individually or in competition with each other. A 2008 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covering adolescent classrooms reported this pattern across a large body of studies.

Source. Roseth, C. J., Johnson, D. W., and Johnson, R. T. (2008). Promoting early adolescents’ achievement and peer relationships. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2).

At camp. Challenges are always team-based, and project tables are arranged so campers constantly borrow ideas and spare hands from each other.

And what about screens?

We are careful here. Research on children and screen time is genuinely mixed, and the strong claims in headlines usually outrun the evidence. Better established is the value of what screen-free time makes room for: sustained attention on one thing, physical making, unstructured social play, and boredom that resolves into invention.

So we do not argue that screens are ruining childhood. We argue that a week of full attention on building something real is worth a great deal, and that it is hard to arrange at home.