Ah, summer camp, a time when parents dump their kids into enrichment activities in the hands of poorly paid instructors so the parents can get a break. Too cynical? Summer camp, a time when kids are starting to get bored with just sitting around the house all summer? But maybe, just maybe, summer camp is a time to try all those cool things you don't get to learn at school/work/home. Yeah, let's go with the last one.

In my non-game guise, I am a college professor, which means I get summers 'off' to do research, write papers, write books, and... hey, wait, that sounds a lot like work! But this isn't about me. It's about summer camps. And it turns out I teach 2 of them. I teach a camp on Python coding and using Raspberry Pis to do cool things (hint: we're flying in space to spend 2 years in orbit, launching in a few months). And this year, I get to add a Game Design & Theory camp!

I am very psyched about running this. It's about game design, not programming, so it focuses on tabletop/board/card games and paper prototyping for eventual computer games. It's based off a 200-level college course I run called, appropriately enough, "Game Design & Theory". It's the one humanities course I teach amidst a workload of engineering & space science courses. My favorite review by a student was "I had a lot of fun, and I actually learned a lot too!" Damned by faint praise indeed.

Just like gaming has its jargon, education and camps have their own, and one topic often brought up is the pair of 'differentiated education' and the population of 'gifted with special learning needs'. The first really is just a fancy way for what most of us consider good teaching practices— that you have multiple paths in your curricula and different ways to tackle learning and assess outcomes. Think of this as a choose-your-own adventure approach to teaching. "You are facing subtraction. Do you learn it with YouTube videos (go to page 3), a lecture by the professor (go to page 5), or self-study from a book (go to page 7)."

Studies in teaching show that lecture + test is not the best way to learn, but it is one of the most cost-effective ways, and it is at least 'adequate' for most learning needs. Higher education is changing— more distance learning and online learning options are available, even at the high school level. Having both taught online classes and watched my kids take them, my opinion of online learning is that we finally, after much searching, found something slightly worse than lecture + test. Online is 'lecture + test' without a teacher in the loop to at least try and track whether any material is sinking in. So that's progress, we've found a less preferential form of learning by moving things online.

Let's look at instructor to student ratios in the real world. The military tends to set an 1-9 or 1-12 in terms of leader-to-troops ratios. LARP GMs recommend a 1-10 ratio of GMs to players. Tabletop games scale likewise. Camps and outdoor activities likewise work in the 1-10 range. Most work projects rarely exceed a 1-10 ratio of workers to team lead/manager. Yet for some reason K12 (kindergarten through high school) education is fine with 1-30 ratios of teacher-to-students, and online courses go with 1-100 ratios. We are applying teaching loads at a ratio that is ridiculous for real-world situations, yet we try to say we are preparing them for real life. Yeah, I have an issue with that.

I think the best way to learn is the workshop, which is basically what a summer camp is. Or what a dude ranch does, or what on-the-job training is, or what real life mostly throws at us. I think a neat college curricula could be created as a series of week-long focused camp-like experiences, strung together to ultimately build skills. We could use GenCon as a model, where people sign up for 4-hour intense slots to run one game, then switch to another completely different experience for the next one. The scalability of teaching is solvable with newer approaches and bringing in more teachers. Oh, wait, hiring more teachers? Not happening. Oh well, at least there's always summer camps.

Until next month, Sandy (sandy@rpg.net), freelance + professor

p.s. for those with kids in the MD/DC/VA interested in my day camps, they are July 30-Aug 3 (Coding Camp) and Aug 6-10 (Game Design Camp) in Laurel MD, at about $450, capped at 15 campers, link at CapTechU.edu