Have you ever felt completely inspired after creating your own animated movie? Are you into computer animation? How does 3d video game model maker sound?
Seems like a great deal to let your kids spend their time in a digital world with a video game camp or a digital camp! Yes, you heard it right — DIGITAL CAMP!
There are a lot of academies offering animation classes for kids, a photoshop summer camp, coding summer camp and even 3d video game model maker courses! But one tech company pops into my mind when I hear animation, Digital Media Academy! It is a digital art and technology education company, located in Palo Alto, CA, and Vancouver, BC, primarily offering STEM summer camp and arts programs for students, age 9-18, at several universities in the US and Canada.
Digital Media Academy (DMA) designs, develops and delivers STEM curriculum for students of all ages. It offers different courses mainly related to creative design, computer science + AI, digital storytelling, game design, music production and robotics + engineering. They put together hundreds of technology educators from all over Northern America to lead, empower, encourage, and inspire the thousands of students who come through their summer camps each year.
Let’s look at the most popular courses being offered by Digital Media Academy to give you a fresh perspective!
Adventures in Animation
“If I were to give you a stack of post-it notes and say, “Make a flip book,” would you have any trouble figuring out how to do it? Probably not! If that sounds like a fun way to burn an hour, you’re in the right place!” – Austin, Digital Media Academy’s Approach to Animation Courses
Adventures in Animation is a week of one of the most popular animation courses of DMA for kids ages 9-12 where you will learn how to produce animated cartoons and movies using the same processes as animators at Pixar, Cartoon Network, and Disney do. You’ll also create drawings and bring them to life, using production techniques such as timelines and keyframes in Toon Boom Harmony™- the same software used to create Spongebob and many more popular cartoons.
What Students Learn
- Animation skills and the fundamentals of storytelling
- How to create “claymation” and “humanimation”
- Cartoon drawing skills
- How to develop a cartoon and create a character
- How to use Toon Boom Harmony, professional animation software
What Students Create
- Digital illustrations and simple drawings
- Storyboards and project plans for their animation projects
- 2D animated short films using keyframes and simple drawings
- A stop-motion animated film using clay and props
- A final animation reel that shows off their work as well as their final project
Adventures in 3D Printing & Modeling
Explore a week of adventure in 3D Printing and Modeling for 9-12 years of age. Students will spend the week using a CAD (computer-aided design) software program called Tinkercad and learning how to break down real-world objects into 3D shapes. They’ll also learn about the 3D printing process, taking the objects from Tinkercad and setting them up for printing in an application called Cura, and then printing them on the Ultimaker 2+ printers.
What Students Learn
- How 3D printers are changing the world
- How to download pre-made 3D models
- How to make a 3D model using TinkerCAD
- How to print a 3D model using a 3D printer and game modeling software
- The design and engineering process used by professionals
- The thinking behind the industrial design and consumer goods
What Students Create
- Printed 3D models (including dice & a treasure chest )
- A final project designed from the ground up that gets printed!
- A variety of 3D Models inside TinkerCAD
- At least one 3D print designed for somebody else
Robotics & Engineering Academy
Get yourself ready for a two-week course in designing, building and programming your own creations in Robotics and Engineering Academy course for ages 12-18 where students will learn how to build and program a robot using Arduino and a pi-top laptop using Python then they’ll take it home!
What Students Learn
- Programming in Arduino
- Signal processing and electronic circuit building
- How to troubleshoot errors and solve logical problems
- Raspberry Pi setup & usage
- Command line interfaces
- Python coding
- Physical Computing
What Students Create
- A robot that performs autonomous tasks
- Unique code that they understand
- Designs for robot improvement and test courses
- Projects that utilize the power of Python, Raspberry Pi, and the Internet
- Basic code that they will be able to modify themselves for future projects
- A fully functional laptop
Audio & Music Production Academy
Be prepared for an exciting two-week course of producing and mixing your own music in Audio & Music Production Academy course for ages 12-18. Here, you will explore professional music production as you learn how to use the most important tools of the industry, like Ableton Live, create and modify sounds while learning layering, mixing, and sampling. You’ll also program your own beats while making your digital music.
What Students Learn
- The fundamentals of music production
- Rhythm and drum machine patterns
- Sampling and synthesizers
- MIDI and audio effects
- Mixing and mastering basics
- The technical theory of audio engineering
- The creative process of songwriting Music
- Theory and composition
- How to record a song from start to finish
- How to Use EQ, effects, and automation
- Advanced mixing and mastering techniques
What Students Create
- Original compositions, mashups or remixes
- A polished final mix of their finished tracks
- A group collaborative project
- An original composition or remix
- A polished final mix of their finished song
- A rough mix of another student’s song
There are still a lot more courses that DMA is offering to all aspiring artists and roboticists at techcamps.digitalmediaacademy.org/
Get the most out of your summer with Digital Media Academy. Here’s a video of satisfied parents and students who took courses from DMA.
References:
https://techcamps.digitalmediaacademy.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Media_Academy
