Class descriptions

GROUPS

Masterminds
Pre-K and K

Trailblazers
1st and 2nd

Innovators
3rd and 4th

Enterprisers
5th and 6th

Challengers
7th

Voyagers
8th

Akudo

Week 1: Math Adventure Quest Board Game

Campers design & build an adventure-themed board game that helps them (and others!) practice math skills through a fun and creative quest.

Campers will design an Adventure Quest board game where players move through a themed world (like a jungle, outer space, or treasure island) by solving math problems. They can add action spaces, story cards, and chance elements. Older kids can help create problems for younger kids!

Week 2: Science Week – Epic Eruptions & Explosions

Campers will explore the science behind fizzing, foaming, and erupting reactions, while learning about chemical changes and gas production.

Week 3: Math Board Games 2.0

Campers level up their game-design skills by adding probability, geometry, and creative math challenges to their board games. They'll learn about math in a playful, collaborative way.

Week 4: Science Week – Physics in Motion

Campers will dive into the forces of motion, gravity, friction, and density through exciting hands-on experiments and engineering challenges.

Week 5: Math Board Game MegaMix

This is the ultimate game-design week! Campers will incorporate money skills, probability, and even cooperative teamwork into advanced math games, then showcase them at a camp-wide game fair.

Week 6: Science Week – Nature & Chemistry

Campers will explore nature and simple chemistry through engaging experiments like making ice cream, studying chromatography, and bubble geometry—all while connecting with the world around them.

Dan

Week 1: Botany for budding scientists

In this fun, hands-on science camp, we’ll uncover the amazing secrets of the plant world—up close and in action. Campers will dissect real flowers, grow their own seeds in clear cups, and take nature walks around campus to spot and identify the different trees, flowers, and plants that grow all around us. With magnifying glasses and plant ID guides in hand, we’ll search for clues to figure out what makes each plant special.

Week 2: Bird Buffet: An Eco-Engineering and Observation Project

Design and build your very own bird feeder using recycled materials, then place it around our beautiful campus to see who flies by for a snack. Each day, you’ll explore different parts of camp looking for bird visitors, checking seed levels, and recording real-life data just like a field biologist.

Week 3: Nature’s Palette: The Science of Outdoor Art

Get ready to explore nature like never before—through the eyes of both a scientist and an artist! In this hands-on, creative course, campers will gather natural materials from the outdoors to create stunning works of art while learning real science behind the materials they use. We’ll paint with chlorophyll from leaves, design camouflage creatures, build leafy mandalas, and press wild plants into handmade nature journals. Along the way, you’ll uncover plant biology and the ecological patterns that inspire everything from textiles to architecture.

Week 4: Where the River Flows: NYC & The Hudson Valley

Did you know that every time you take a sip of water in New York City, it might have traveled over 100 miles through mountains, tunnels, and rivers to reach you? In this hands-on science adventure, we’ll uncover the hidden journey of NYC’s water — straight from the Hudson Valley watershed to your kitchen faucet! In this course, we will be testing real water from the hudson river, map the network of aqueductus and reservoirs that make up the hudson valley watershed, and engineer and test mini water filters like an environmental scientist. Become a water detective and discover how nature and engineering team up to keep NYC hydrated.

Week 5: Birds of Prey: Owl Detectives

In this hands-on ecology adventure, you’ll get up close with real owl pellets to uncover what these amazing birds eat—yes, you’ll dissect owl pellets and find bones from real animals! Each day, you’ll explore how owls survive in the wild, learn about their super senses, and discover their role as top predators in the food web. If you love animals, science mysteries, and getting your hands a little dirty, this is the course for you!

Week 6: Mini-Earth Makers: Design Your Own Ecosystem

In this hands-on biology adventure, you’ll become an ecosystem engineer as you build your very own living mini-world. Design and create your own self-sustaining habitat using real plants, water, soil, and more. Each day brings outdoor discoveries and cool challenges as you watch your tiny ecosystem come to life.

Johnelle

Week 1: marble run

Jump into the world of physics with fun, hands-on activities! In week one, students will assemble different tunnels on a wall for a marble to run through the top of a board to the bottom. Through this activity, we will explore how gravity, potential energy, and kinetic energy work together. Students will also learn about simple machines—like inclined planes and levers—and use them to make their designs even more exciting and efficient.

Week 2: Build Your Own Boat

Students will dive into the science of floating and sailing as they explore why boats stay afloat and how sails catch the wind. Using recycled materials from home such as yogurt cups and tupperware, they’ll design and build their own sailboats to comprehend mass, force, and buoyancy. This hands-on activity helps students become engineers for a week!

Week 3: energy week!

This week, students will explore different forms of energy, compare fossil fuels to clean energy, and discover simple ways to reduce their carbon footprint. We’ll take a closer look at solar energy and why it’s becoming such an important and popular power source. The class will lead to students building their own solar ovens using pizza boxes—perfect for eco-friendly cooking at a campsite or right at home! It’s a fun, practical way to see renewable energy in action.

Week 4: Egg Drop Challenge

This week is all about gravity—the invisible force that affects us every day! Students will explore the concepts of gravity, inertia, and impact by connecting them to real-life situations, like the importance of wearing seatbelts or holding onto something on the subway. For the hands-on challenge, students will design and build their own egg landers, aiming to drop an egg from a height without it cracking.

Week 5: Bridge Building

Get ready to think like real engineers! This week, students will design and build their own bridges using just popsicle sticks and glue. While learning about important physics concepts like tension and mass, they’ll also explore how engineers test structures for strength and stability. The big challenge: create a tall bridge that can hold the most weight without collapsing! This activity sparks creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving—perfect for future inventors and engineers.

Week 6: Rube Goldberg

In our final week, students will bring together everything they’ve learned by building their own Rube Goldberg machines! These creative contraptions rely on a chain reaction of events—often silly or surprising—to complete a simple task. While working in teams to move a ping pong ball through a series of reactions, students will take a deeper dive into physics concepts like simple machines, momentum, and friction.

JosÉ

Week 1: Pigment Play — Painting & Printmaking

Get ready to dive into color! This week, campers will explore the world of painting and printmaking—from classic brushwork to experimental techniques. We’ll begin by learning color mixing and composition through creative exercises. Then we’ll go back to basics and make our own natural dyes using berries, flowers, and plants! Campers will also experiment with DIY printmaking: potato stamps, cardboard plates, and other low-tech methods that unlock high-impact visuals. To end the week, everyone will contribute to a large-scale collaborative mural sketch—bringing together their individual styles into one collective piece.

Week 2: Sculpt the World — Clay, Form & Wearable Structures

This week is all about shape, space, and imagination. Campers will explore sculpture as a way of building stories in three dimensions. We’ll sculpt characters, objects, and scenes using air-dry clay, then set up interactive installations using cameras to explore our creations from different angles. We’ll even take our projects outdoors and let our sculptures interact with real-world settings! For our grand finale, each camper will create a wearable sculpture—an extension of their body—like a third arm, a jetpack, or any sort of creative modification! 

Week 3: Snap, Stage, Repeat — Photography as Play

This week, campers will explore photography as a way of seeing—and shaping—the world around them. We’ll start by experimenting with light and shadow, color filters, and reflective materials. Then we’ll build our own photo sets using everyday objects and fabric backdrops. Campers will take turns staging scenes, posing, directing, and documenting. We'll also head outside to see what we notice in the world when we slow down and shoot like artists. From mini still lifes to full-body portraits, this week is all about observation, imagination, and making pictures together.

Week 4: Mini Movies — DIY Filmmaking & Set Design

Lights, camera… action! This week, campers become filmmakers—learning how to plan, shoot, and act in their own DIY movie. We’ll dive into storyboarding, set and prop design, camera angles, and teamwork. Each camper will rotate through different roles: director, actor, camera operator, set designer, and more. By week’s end, we’ll produce our own “sweded” film—a low-budget, homemade remake of a popular movie—using only what we have on hand and a whole lot of imagination.

Week 5: Sky Stories — Building & Flying Our Own Kites

Let’s take our creativity to the skies! This week, campers will design and build their own functional kites, learning how art meets engineering. We’ll look at kite traditions from around the world and experiment with shape, color, and construction. Campers will decorate their kites to reflect personal stories, patterns, or characters. Then it’s time to fly! We'll test our designs outdoors, learn what makes kites soar (or nosedive), and refine them together.

Week 6: Puppet Lab — Stories with Strings & Sticks

From shadow creatures to cardboard critters, puppets help bring our stories to life! This week, campers will explore the wild world of puppetry—discovering techniques used in different cultures and inventing their own characters. We’ll experiment with simple finger puppets, rod puppets, and even large-scale collaborative creations that require multiple puppeteers. Campers will also improvise their own stories while rotating and sharing puppets—seeing how the same character can transform in different hands. Throughout the week, we’ll work in groups to build a short puppet show that combines storytelling, movement, and handmade magic.

Naomi

Week 1: Brick Racers: Real-World Mario Kart

Calling all racers! It’s time to take Mario Kart off the screen and into the real world. Campers will team up to explore robot building and block coding using LEGO Spike kits. Throughout the week, they'll customize, test, and program their bots to speed, steer, and avoid obstacles. Everything builds up to a final classroom race where teams go head-to-head, aiming to complete the track the fastest.

Week 2: Mission: Code Micro:Bit

Building is only one part of robotics, bots need brains too! This week, campers will dive into the world of coding using Micro:bits: small but mighty microcontrollers. They’ll learn to connect inputs, outputs, and sensors, gaining a strong foundation in logic and problem-solving. Through fun challenges like digital name tags, step counters, and a rock-paper-scissors simulator, campers will see how coding brings tech to life.

Week 3: Fab & Fabled: Build Your Beast

Ever dreamed up your own mythical creature? Now’s your chance to bring it to life! This week, campers will explore fabrication techniques, with a focus on computer-aided design (CAD) and 3D printing. From sketch to screen to print, they'll build their creatures layer by layer. To wrap up the week, campers will test their engineering skills in an epic egg drop challenge, designing structures to protect their magical creations from the ultimate fall!

Week 4: Design & Dash

We’re kicking creativity into high gear! In the first half of the week, campers will build and code LEGO robots to conquer a variety of obstacle course challenges. Then the real twist begins: each team will design and fabricate their own course section to challenge others. This mash-up of robotics and engineering lets campers collaborate, innovate, and compete as both designers and drivers. Can their bots beat the course? Can their creations stump the competition?

Week 5: Project Launchpad

Do you like building? How about launching things across the room? This week is all about flight! Each day campers will tackle a new type of launcher, from cotton ball cannons to catapults, paper airplane throwers to mechanized arms. They’ll explore force, trajectory, and creative design through hands-on experiments. Daily distance challenges offer bonus points, and the week wraps with a high stakes launch competition where the farthest flight earns bragging rights.

Week 6: Bot Bash: LEGO Fight Club

Get ready to enter the arena! This week, campers will build and program LEGO robots for a Battlebots style showdown. They’ll take on roles like lead builder, coder, designer, and team driver, working together to strategize and strengthen their bots with defense features. As they prepare for head-to-head matches, campers will learn about mechanical design, teamwork, and gameplay.

paulina

Week 1: Design Time Machine

This week young designers will travel through time to imagine the buildings of tomorrow. Imagine the world in 100 years and make your visions leap off the page using ancient modeling techniques such as Kirigami. We will build pipecleaner palaces and Pop-Up structures and practice tracing and collaging to combine our models into futuristic masterpieces!

Week 2: Nature Architecture: Treehouses, Birdhouses, and Fairyhouses

This week, designers will put on their detective and photographer hats for outdoor nature challenges to discover the hidden homes found in the trees and plants outside. Through photography and sketching, campers will design tree houses, birdhouses and fairy houses. We will explore the outdoor classroom to inspire our designs and guide us through concepts such as plans, sections and elevations-- we will even gather one-of-a kind natural materials to build cozy hideaways and eco-masterpieces!

Week 3: Bubble Wizardry and Floating Fortresses

This week we will learn the secrets behind architectural illusions to design structures that hover like they’re under a spell. Our journey will begin with building enchanted 3D bubble wands, discovering how we can trap squares and cubes inside of soap bubbles. We will investigate this magic trick uncovering the hidden superpowers of tension and compression that can transform ordinary materials into levitating buildings.

Week 4: Waffles vs. Pancakes + Wearable Cardboard Creations

This week we will breakdown cardboard construction techniques that make it easy to build organic forms and whacky shapes into 3d models. We will solve an age old debate in a Waffles vs Pancakes structural integrity showdown, to discover which geometric forms create the strongest foundations, distribute weight, or optimize acoustics. Our experiments will guide our designs of wearable models using cardboard construction methods— from shock absorbent armor, or immersive soundproof astronaut helmets. Let's explore cardboard’s endless possibilities.

Week 5: Kinetic Modeling and Shape shifting structures

This week campers will design both buildings and inventions through experimenting with kinetic systems that enable our buildings to move, shift and transform. Master pulley systems to create models of elevators and drawbridges. Make a building that can transform into a robot using hinges, linkages and origami. Let's use architecture to problem solve, adapt and perform.

Week 6: Spherical Adventures: Personal Pods and Friendship Domes

This week we will explore scale, patterning, and collaboration in this week’s spherical adventure. Design dream pods out of clay or marshmallow igloos revealing how architecture can control airflow and temperature. Let’s work collaboratively to design the perfect Fieldston Future Leaders dome and learn about the endless ways a space can be utilized— we will end the summer working together to build a life sized geodesic dome.

Tamar

Week 1: Science of Color

Explore the colors of the world! Campers will uncover the science behind what we see, from rainbow-making prisms to pigments in ink. We’ll explore chromatography and learn about the different wavelengths of light, from the visual spectrum to powerful UV rays.

Week 2: boats

Set sail for the science of floating and boating! Campers will explore buoyancy, build boats from foil and foam, and learn how to optimize their designs. This collaborative, project-based week will teach campers how to work together swimmingly.

Week 3: circuits

Spark your imagniation with the electrifying world of circuits! From human-powered demos using bouncy balls to real batteries, wires, and lightbulbs, campers will build their own working circuits to explore the material proeprties of conductivity and resistance. We’ll finish the week by creating paper circuit art that really shines.

Week 4: Magnetism

Explore a fundamental force of the universe! Campers will investigate the unique properties of magnets through generating hypotheses and testing them with hands-on lab experiments. Get ready to test magnetic strength, design magnetic structures, and even make your own working compass!

Week 5: Chemicals and Chemical Reactions

Get ready to fizz, bubble, and mix! Campers become chemists as they perform lab experiments with materials like vinegar, baking soda, soap, and honey. They’ll explore chemical reactions, identify acids and bases, build density towers, and even make their own lava lamps.

Week 6: Dynamics

Get ready to bounce, roll, and race! This week is all about why things go. Campers will explore motion, forces, and inertia through hands-on games and experiments.

Vera

Week 1: The Science of Heat (Thermal Energy & States of Matter)

This week, our curious cooks become heat detectives! Through melting cheese, freezing fruit, and exploring how temperature transforms food, students will dive into the science of hot and cold. From pizza bagels to fruit popsicles, we’ll experiment, observe, and taste the effects of heat in the kitchen while learning all about solids, liquids, and gases!

Week 2: Kitchen Math Magic (Addition, Subtraction, Fractions)

Who knew math could be so tasty? This week, campers will chop, measure, scoop, and stir their way through colorful recipes while learning important math skills like fractions, sequencing, and estimation. From rainbow veggie wraps to granola ball geometry, every bite reinforces counting, sorting, and problem-solving in the most delicious way!

Week 3: CHEMISTRY IN THE KITCHEN, REACTIONS & TRANSFORMATIONS - Bubble, fizz, rise!

Our junior food chemists will explore the amazing reactions that happen when ingredients mix. Whether it’s watching pancakes puff or lemonade fizz, campers will see chemistry in action—and taste the results! It’s a week full of surprise transformations, sticky fun, and scientific wow moments!

Week 4: The Engineering of Recipes (Sequencing, Systems, Tools)

It’s time to build, layer, and construct! This week, we explore how recipes work like blueprints and how kitchen tools are the gadgets that bring our designs to life. From sandwich stacks to custom parfaits, students will develop sequencing skills, teamwork, and problem-solving abilities while cooking up tasty creations one smart step at a time.

Week 5: Global Flavors & Cultural Connections

Pack your taste buds—we’re traveling the world through food! From Mexico’s guacamole to Japan’s sushi rolls, students will learn how different cultures prepare, celebrate, and enjoy meals. Through hands-on cooking, storytelling, and art, campers will explore how food connects us all and why flavors from every corner of the globe deserve a seat at the table.

Week 6: Creative Cooking Showcase (Art & Innovation)

It’s showtime! In our grand finale week, students become master chefs as they invent, plan, and present their very own original dishes using mystery ingredients. With teamwork, imagination, and a sprinkle of fun, we’ll turn the kitchen into a stage—complete with storytelling, decorations, and awards. This exciting finale lets our young chefs shine, reflect, and celebrate all they’ve learned!

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