• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Camp H kicked off this year with another full class of fearless girls ready to dive into building and designing projects for local organizations.

During the first two weeks of camp, the design and build sessions, 44 girls (22 girls each week) were enrolled. The girls took on some ambitious design and building projects for a camp partner, the Women’s Daytime Drop-In Center. WDDC provides counseling, job placement, and housing services for homeless and abused women and their children. These were gifts for the women at the center as well. The campers learned (or improved!) their skills with a speed square, tape measure, chop saw, drills, drivers, sanders, and finishing stain to produce a book shelf, mailbox system, and built-in desk unit for the women’s center. They also took part in 6 hours of Adobe Illustrator instruction on the ThinkPad P50 workstations and learned how to produce vector artwork to laser-etch onto wooden boxes and picture frames. Over the course of the week, the girls also took part in active discussions about confidence, teamwork, skill-building, and what it means to challenge yourself in creative, technical, and physical ways.

Finishing out the first half of camp, the girls had an action-packed week of field trips and workshops, and explored the many possibilities within STEM fields. On the first day, Camp H hosted MakerGirl, a mobile 3D printing group from the University of Illinois, and each girl used TinkerCAD to create an object that represented a personal goal. That same day, they learned about basic circuitry and made LED greeting cards and stickers on a vinyl cutter; using many of the same vector-graphic principles as that were learned in the first 2 weeks of camp. The second day, everyone visited OtherMachine, a company that manufactures Other Mill, a very precise small-scale CNC mill, and the University of California College of Environmental Design Fabrication Shop. On the third day Camp H hosted Ali Ent, industrial designer extraordinaire from Lenovo, who showed the girls her history and work in design and engineering, and specifically her design for the ThinkStation P900 machine. The girls disassembled and re-assembled the machine, learning what each part did, and how it was designed for ease of use and maintenance. That same day, the campers also visited OpenROV, an underwater robot company, The Hanging Stick, a woodshop with a 5-axis CNC machine, and took part in a solar lantern workshop with UC Davis student Nikitaa Sivaakumar. On the last day together, the campers visited MethodHome, the soap company, to learn about their use of 3D printing to prototype new packaging designs as well as their amazing science lab where they cook up new fragrances and cleaning products. The campers closed out the week by stopping by Ideo in San Francisco, where the girls did a design thinking workshop to design a new backpack for their partner.

“I learned that without teamwork you can’t get most things done.” Camp H Camper