Ask Slashdot: Tech-Related Summer Camps For Teenagers? 177
First time accepted submitter jcreus writes "I am a teenager (aged 14, though turning 15 before summer), and I've recently been looking for summer camps in the USA. My interests include physics, mathematics (to a lesser extent) and computer science (I already know several programming languages). However, I haven't been able to find anything really exciting. The difficulties I've found include the fact that most are general-oriented, whereas I'm seeking something specific. Furthermore, some are USA-student-only (and I'm European), and most computer-science oriented camps seem to be for non-programmers. What are your experiences with such camps?"
Re:Why USA? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why USA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe. What are you going to want to do next summer, go to summer camp in North Korea?
I think this kid would like to broaden his horizons. I don't think this would be a negative experience overall, as a youth I attended a summer camp located on the border between Canada and the US, besides North Americans, there were a number of other nationalities. It made for a more interesting experience.
I think this sort of thing should be encouraged, it not only will benefit him, but the other campers will benefit being exposed to his culture.
Re:Why USA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe. What are you going to want to do next summer, go to summer camp in North Korea?
To learn about the USA, and make up his own mind. Then he can return to Europe, and be pleased with what he has, but see what should be improved.
(I visited the USA when I was 14, with my parents. We did a massive 8000km road trip. This is said so often by Europeans that it's a cliché: it was a great place to visit, but I don't want to live there.)
Why not something non-tech for summer camp? (Score:5, Insightful)
I might be completely off-base here but, at 14, It seems that you already spend more than fair share of your time on these "tech" pursuits (you already know a lot of programming languages and have interests in physics and math). I have been on that path before - pursuing purely tech/geek oriented tasks and activities. My suggestion is to go for something that's completely tangential to your personality, something out of your comfort zone - it'll expand your horizons and challenge you in a way that'll continue to benefit you throughout your life. I would highly recommend ballroom dancing (or salsa for that matter) - it's a highly social activity, you interact a lot with the members of opposite sex and you learn dancing too [trust me, it comes in handy when going out clubbing in college :D]. Other options include painting and learning a new musical instrument.
A long time ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the summer of '87, just before I graduated high school, I was among a small group of students chosen to spend a week in a computer science summer camp run by Stuart Reges at Stanford. The lectures were all across the board, a smattering of a lot of stuff. We had a lab of Mac 512Ke computers (and a Mac Plus fileserver) on which we learned the basics of Lisp, and there was a networking lecture which posed the Two Generals' Problem, and a lecture on artificial intelligence gave us the Muddy Children Puzzle, and we got to learn Emacs on the school's VAX running VMS, and we got a glimpse of X windows running on a Sun workstation, and I remember a night in an auditorium where we got to see an Amiga use its 4096-color palette to display photorealistic images!
But the most important thing I learned that week - the thing that I've carried with me all the years since then - is that there are *other people like me*. I was a geek in an athletic high school. I was the kid who got beat up and picked on. I was told I had no future because I spent my free time disassembling Apple II games and figuring out how they worked instead of kicking a football. And I believed it - until the day I arrived at that Stanford camp and found other kids who did this sort of stuff, and built robots at home, and memorized pi to a hundred digits, and knew magic tricks, and had a whole bunch of other neat things in their heads which today seem stereotypically nerdy but, back then, the important thing is that none of them involved kicking a football, and these kids were *proud* of who they were and what they could do.
It was only a week. I could say that week changed my life, but it would be more accurate to say that, without it, I might not be here today.
hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A long time ago... (Score:2, Insightful)
So you met kids who, just like the jocks who picked on you, were unreasonably proud of their own more-or-less meaningless skills. Like magic tricks and memorizing pi to 100 digits. Thus was your identification with nerd subculture cemented forever. Yeah; I'm not sure I view that as a positive thing. And I say this as someone who is not athletic, went to nerdy schools and works as a software developer.