— Day 1 - Set Up and Introduction to Game Design: Our primary goal for this day is to assist students in setting up Minecraft and to familiarize kids with our camp’s objectives. The class will play through various mini-games in Minecraft to get some ideas for their upcoming projects in the camp. Students will then start designing very basic elements of their maps and games through the creation of Parkour.

⁠— Day 2 - Ziggy: After an introduction to what Ziggy is, students will design a Ziggy map in Minecraft in which they will get all work together for the first time on one project!

⁠— Day 3 - PVP Mini-Games and Capture The Flag: Students will discover what makes a player-versus-player game fun and build their own PVP game map with established competitive goals and win conditions. 

⁠— Day 4 - Hide and Seek Mini-Game: Students will learn the basic rules of vanilla Hide and Seek games in Minecraft. They will then implement a few additional rules to personalize and build their own Hide and Seek map before playtesting with others.

⁠— Day 5 - Polishing Your Mini-Game: We’ll show students various ways they can polish their favorite mini-games and give students time to enhance their favorite one to share and playtest with the rest of the class.

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.