Create and Play Camps are video game design and themed camps teaching kids real-world technology skills such as programming, graphic design and app creation.

We are in our third year of running the Create and Play Summer Camps at our eBash stores and each year is more exciting than the last.  Our first year in 2013 we offered 7 weeks of classes in our Indianapolis store and 7 weeks of classes in our Terre Haute store and averaged 14 kids per week.

In 2014 we offered 7 weeks in Indianapolis, 2 weeks in our Evansville franchise location and 2 weeks in our Terre Haute store.  That year we hosted 18 campers each week on average.

This year in 2015 we only offered 6 weeks of classes in our Indianapolis store and 1 week of classes in our Terre Haute store.  It took us three years to figure out this model, but each week instead of featuring one or maybe two courses we featured 3 different courses for campers.  We averaged 27 kids each week at our camps this year!

Students for our camps range in age from 8-16 depending on the course material. This group built their own mobile games during their week at camp!

Thanks to our friends at Alienware we had enough systems to handle a larger number of attendees each week.  The campers took courses ranging from Intro to Video Game Design with Microsoft’s Project Spark to Modding in Minecraft where they learned basic Javascript methods and principles.  In the Video Games & Graphics class students got a taste of working with graphic design programs and the Mobile App Design class allowed kids to make their own mobile games using Construct 2.

We continue to also offer mobile classes throughout the year through partners at different locations such as the Terre Haute Children’s Museum.  These courses are set-up to be a single day class or an after school program.  Check out this cool story that the local news covered from one of our mobile camps:

http://wthitv.com/2014/10/13/childrens-museum-working-to-provide-fall-activities/

Overall we are extremely happy with our camp programs and love seeing some of the same kids return each year to continue learning real-world skills through their love of video games.  We hope to perhaps develop this program into something that can consistently run around the year and teach more advanced systems and techniques for the students that want to keep pursuing a career in video game design or other technology training.