| Anonymous | This is a review of the "Intro to Coding for Machine Learning" camp offered at Falls Church, VA in July, 2019, which turned to be more of a day care than an academically rigorous summer school.
I base my conclusion on my 17 year old daughter's report from the first day of the 5 day camp and my own first-hand observation of the afternoon of the second day.
I chose this camp in consultation with an ID tech associate, where I explained that my 17 year old daughter wanted to learn more about coding to see if she wanted to study it in college. The age range for this course was 13 – 17 years old. Our first disappointment came when we realized that all of the iD Tech camps shared the same classroom at the Falls Church campus, so my college prep daughter was seated literally next to 10 year olds enrolled in “Video Production: Start Your Own YouTube Channel.”
The camp counselor (I purposefully do not use the title “instructor”) made no initial attempt to survey the entering knowledge level of students.
When I visited the camp on the afternoon of day 2, I explained that it didn’t feel like a good fit for a college prep student. The site director (Vickie) was super polite but made no offer nor effort to modify their program to better suit my daughter’s goals. They seem to very purposefully be providing a particular service, which is not college prep. That service, best I could tell, is “themed daycare.”
If the “Intro to coding…” camp had a syllabus or learning objectives, the site director didn’t offer to share them.
Unlike a summer term academic term, where the content is compressed to fit into a shorter period of time, here the sparse content seemed to be spread thinly throughout the day to expand enough to fill an entire work day.
Contact hours discussing coding with the camp counselor were no greater than 50% of each day and multiple, extended blocks of unsupervised time were quickly filled by the younger campers with Fortnite gaming. I personally observed 8 of the 10 campers engaged in extended gaming sessions.
I withdrew my daughter from the camp before the end of the 2nd day and forfeited our tuition. |