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Palo Alto Daily News - February 23, 2007
Summer camp offers cutting edge of digital skills
By Banks Albach
Butterflies under a magnifying glass, archery in the woods and kayaking aren't at this summer camp - unless the visitors are enhancing the butterfly in Photoshop, making an archery video game or editing a digital video of a kayaker.
iD Tech Camps is a family-grown Silicon Valley program in its ninth year that reels in hundreds of kids ages 7-17 at programs at numerous universities including Stanford, UCLA, Northwestern and MIT. Costing between $700 and $1,100 for weeklong day and overnight stays, the program offers 3D animation, video editing and production, robotics programming and Web design, among tech topics.
Students may register for one or several weeks and some lab courses cost additional fees.
Stephen Knotts, 13, of Palo Alto, said his summers would feel incomplete without the tech camp. Since he started at the Stanford campus in 2003, Knotts has worked in digital video production, 3D game design, Web design, programming robotics.
"I've been using computers since I was about 2 years old," Knotts said. "There's more to making movies than just editing clips together. You have to walk around campus and find places that will be good for a movie."
It will be 14-year-old Evan Reed's fourth summer at Stanford this year.
"I learned team-building, they taught me movie concepts, story boarding and how to use editing software," said Reed, of Los Altos. "I love it."
His mom Joanne said it's logical to get the younger generation on a technical track.
"I don't know what it's going to mean, but I think its going to be an important part of his life," she said.
E-mail Banks Albach at balbach@dailynewsgroup.com
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