— Day 1 - Set Up and Redstone Railways: Our primary goal for this day is to assist students in setting up Minecraft and to familiarize kids to our course’s objectives. Our first class will introduce students to the Engineering Design Process and how it can be applied to Redstone. Students will get the hands-on experience using Redstone to build an amusement park ride.

⁠— Day 2 - Redstone Input and Output: After learning more about Redstone inputs and outputs, students will complete their roller coaster and add more rides to our amusement park using the Redstone principles discussed today.

⁠— Day 3 - Redstone Piston Doors: Piston doors can be used to hide secret areas in a home. In this session, students will use piston doors to create secret entrances in their homes that will only reveal themselves when the correct object is activated.

⁠— Day 4 - Redstone Contraptions: Students will learn about useful contraptions they can add to their houses, like automatic farms, sorting machines, auto-smelters, and flying machines.

⁠— Day 5 - Redstone Clocks and Signals: Students will explore how Redstone signals can be manipulated to create timed mechanisms and traps that operate in intervals for their parkour courses.

⁠— Day 6 - Logic Gates: We’ll go over the basics of logic gates and how certain combinations of inputs can be adjusted to influence the output signal. These Redstone gates will then be used to make puzzles in Minecraft.

⁠— Day 7 - Redstone Locks: By learning how to use Redstone comparators, students can create locking systems that compare and output signals depending on its settings. These will then be used in student-created dungeons to keep certain rooms inaccessible without the right “key”.

⁠— Day 8 - Combining Redstone to create a Dungeon: Students will complete their Minecraft dungeons by utilizing everything they’ve learned about Redstone. Afterwards, the class will take turns to test out each student’s dungeons and the obstacles within them.

Connected Camps is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2015 with the mission to build a global online community where kids build, code, play, and learn alongside one another. Our programs are designed based on extensive research in the learning sciences. The founders and leaders of Connected Camps, Mimi Ito and Katie Salen, are professors at the University of California, Irvine, who specialize in the design of online learning experiences that are fun, social, and directly tied to academic outcomes. Learn more about the research behind Connected Camps at the Connected Learning Alliance resource site: https://clalliance.org/ 

One thing that makes our programs unique is our near-peer mentorship model. Our programs are led by young adults and college students, often with the help of high school volunteers. We hire counselors and coaches from top universities in computer science, game development, economics, social studies, and the arts, and train them on how to facilitate project-based learning with younger kids. Our young instructors have the same passion for technology, games, and digital making as our learners, and take on the role of instructors, as well as fellow enthusiasts and relatable role models.

The curriculum for this program was designed by a team of counselors pursuing degrees relevant to the material at hand. The learning experiences in this class are driven by these counselors’ academic expertise in the field, along with their desire to share their passion for the subject with a group of excited learners. All of Connected Camps’ curricula are vetted by the organization’s Product Manager, Matthew, who possesses a Masters in Secondary Education and a deep belief in the power of collaborative virtual learning.