iD News and Blog

We are passionate about introducing children of all ages to the wonders and benefits of the sciences and technology, and offer camps ranging from film to computers and robotics. Summer computer camps, film camps, robotics camps, cyber camps — we can help you find the summer camp that's right for your child.

It’s On! iD Tech Camps Announces It’s 2010 Summer Camp Lineup

Dear iD Nation,

I want to personally welcome you to the iD Family.  To our returning families, I know you’ve been looking forward to our 2010 launch.  Yesterday we started taking registrations at 8 AM, and the phones were ringing busily all day.  That’s a good sign!  We had  a banner year in 2009, so we think 2010 will be even better.

An obvious question many families are asking is “What’s New?”.  I am going to cut and paste some content from our “What’s New” page on our website:

• Digital Catalog – Our summer camp catalog is now available.
• Registration is now live! – Register with our latest promotion and save $100 by 12-15-09.  And when you refer-a-friend, you now save $50 and your friend does too!
• New Locations – New prestigious university locations including the campuses of Harvard, Princeton, Adelphi, Bentley, the expansion of our Teen Academies nationally, and our expansion into Canada.
• New Courses at iD Tech Camps – Awesome new courses include iPhone® App Development, Digital Photography & Photoshop®, RPG Game Design & Graphic Arts Hybrid, Game Modding with titles including Warcraft® III, Starcraft®, Half-Life® 2 and more.  Go to courses and programs.
• Expansion of our Teen Academies – The  iD Programming Academy has expanded to MIT.  The intensive game development program, the iD Gaming Academy has expanded to Chicago and Seattle.  We’ve also launched the new iD Visual Arts Academy. The Teen Academies are for ages 13-18.
• iD 365 – Endless Summer – Upon registration at iD, you now get access to our monthly FREE online workshops, taught year round by live instructors.  More.
• Receive Continuing Education Units from Villanova University or Stanford Continuing Studies.  Details.
• The iD Guarantee – We average 6 students per instructor at iD Tech Camps.  If we exceed an  8:1 ratio, you get to return for a free week of camp at equal value.  It’s that simple!  It’s iD quality.  And it’s only at iD!  Note:  Not valid for Teen Academies. Get details.
• New Games – Hot new commercial gaming titles used in our gaming courses, gaming tournaments and Ultimate Gaming Weekends.
• Learn Valuable “Life Skills” – We’re building new life skills content for this year.  The curriculum will round out the summer experience. See the benefits of iD. We’ve also got fun new camp activities for students.
• Technology Isn’t Just for Boys – We’ve created more courses and modules that are be appealing to girls including Web Design & Flash® Animation, Graphic Design, Video Editing & Special Effects, Digital Photography & Photoshop and the new teen-only  iD Visual Arts Academy.
• Go Green – We continue our iD Greening initiative by promoting carpooling, reducing travel and energy consumption and establishing new outreach partnerships in the communities we serve.
• The Basement.  For Students Only! – Find out what the buzz is about.   Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.  Blogs.  Student Project Uploads.  Camp Photos.  iD 365.  And more.  Head down to the The Basement!

OK, I’m back.  As you can see, we’ve been a bit busy preparing for this launch.  You might expect that we kick back and take a few months off in the Fall, but nothing could be further from the truth.  We’ve got the hardest working crew in the summer camp industry.  We’ve had teams working around the clock to pull all the pieces together…working with new locations (including the expansion of our Teen Academies and a push into Canada), developing curriculum, developing back-end applications, signing contracts, overhauling our website, developing content, designing our camp brochure, working with new corporate partners, creating new courses, and so much more.

The launch is a big, big team effort, and it is a sign of our company’s organization and dedication to providing the very best.

On behalf of all our employees, we want to welcome you to the new camp season.  We hope you’ll take a few minutes to look around our website.  And, as always, we’re just a phone call away.

Best,

Pete Ingram-Cauchi

CEO, iD Tech Camps

 

November 2nd, 2009 | Tags: 2010 summer camp, computer camps, Summer Camps
Posted in CEO's Blog, Summer Camps Submit a Comment »

 

 

Tilt-Shift Photography, or How to Make Everything Look Tiny

This is a large format camera:

Unlike your digital camera (which most likely doesn’t even need you to focus), or an old-school SLR film camera (which only needs focus, shutter speed, and aperture), a large format camera has a lot of controls. Check out how each piece moves in 3 dimensions in the picture below:

2 of the adjustments you can make are called tilt and shift. Without getting TOO technical, what you’re doing is moving different focus planes to interact with each other in a way that you can’t really do with other cameras, thus selecting a certain region of the film to be in focus. There are modern tools that can do this on modern cameras (even digital!) – for example, lensbaby.com offers a lens that can make those adjustments. What will this do for you? You may remember this picture from a previous blog entry:

So, if you don’t have an extra $350 to spend on a lens (ok, let’s face it, you’re going to use it to buy video games and Mt. Dew), you can still acheive this same effect with a Gaussian Blur. It’s a great effect. You take a picture of normal sized people and magically they become miniatures!

Select a round (circular or oval-shaped) selection around the center, in focus, portion of your photo. Invert your selection and feather it by a lot. 100 pixels isn’t too many. Select Gaussian Blur from the filters section and experiment with settings. Can you make a photo look like these?

Email me *your* contributions at justin(at)internaldrive.com (@ symbol left out intentionally to prevent robotic spam crawling!) and I’ll post the best ones in a future entry.

 

October 27th, 2009 | Tags: iD Tech Camp, photography, Photoshop
Posted in iD Tech Bloggers Submit a Comment »

 

 

Four Online Games to Exercise Your Brain!

It is well accepted that games and puzzles serve to keep ones brain sharp. In fact, there is even pending research that the kind of stimulation they provide can prevent/slow the progression of certain mental conditions such as Alzheimer’s and even improve cognition in individuals who’ve suffered head trauma. Additionally some types of games require social interaction which benefits ones social skills, especially in young adolescences as it develops the their ability to corporate (or beguile!) to achieve an objective. At the very least, games are a fun way of giving your brain a work out, which is just as important to exercise as the rest of your body.

Here are 4 very fun “brain games” that I personally frequent. They are each very different and promote very different types of cognitive skills.

1) http://games.asobrain.com/ – Xplorers

Mental Muscles flexed:

• Memory
• Social Skills
• Strategy, Planning Ahead
• Resources Management

“Aso Brain Games” offers a view games, however I’ve chosen it for one in particular; Xplorers. Xplorers is a carbon copy of the best selling, European, tabletop board “The Settlers of Catan” by Klaus Tuber. It is a classic “German-style board” game as it encourages a very high-level of player interaction, is simple, short and highly aesthetic. In a nutshell, the game resembles a hybrid of Risk and Monopoly, minus all the boring parts (seriously when is the last time you finished either?)

2) http://www.flashbynight.com/drench/ – Drench

Mental Muscles flexed:

• Visuospatial Cognition
• Planning Ahead

The self-proclaimed “World’s Simplest Flash Game”. Players have a limited number of moves to paint a grid all one color. Moves must be planned based on the pattern of the pre-existing pixels, which is randomly generated from 6 different colors. Calling for an extremely high level of visual concentration, players will becoming increasingly adept at interpreting a seemingly chaotic grid of colors. Though very different from Chess, players must think several moves ahead, similar to Chess players. As each move yields a tree of options, players must think through as many options while they can keep track of, all the while swimming in a sea of brightly colored pixels!

3) http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/ - Fantastic Contraption

Mental Muscles flexed:

• Creative Problem Solving
• Understanding of Physics and Engineering
• Trial and Error

This game allows user to build contraptions to compete various tasks. The game is very open ended and it’s puzzles can be solved in a variety of ways, there is no one correct answer. This gives it tremendous reliability as you can revisit puzzles to try and solve them is a simpler way (or a more complicated way!). What is particular fun about this game is that one can build their own levels and share them with the community. Participants have used this to create spin-offs of the game such as “Battle Bots” in which users create contraptions which joust one another!

4) http://games.swirve.com/earth/ – Earth 2025

Mental Muscles flexed:

• Resource Management
• Long Term Strategy / Planning
• Social Skills
• Mathematics / Statistics

This text-based game is run tournament style in month long and two-month long installments. Hundreds of player compete in building an empire. During that time they must find ways to monetize, defend and expand their empire by employing a variety of different strategies. Seeking out alliances are needed for survival. The game allows for many different types of play; will your empire’s army brutally conquer others or will you focus on industry and grow rich through exporting goods?

What are your favorite brain games?

 

October 23rd, 2009 | Posted in iD Tech Bloggers Submit a Comment »

 

 

Green Blog Action Day!

o maybe you’ve heard of Copenhagen. No, I’m not talking about the little can, I’m talking about the UN-sponsored global summit on climate change. If you haven’t heard of it, you must not read very many blogs! October 15th is designated as “Blog Action Day,” and 20000+ different blogs mentioned the big day. One interesting thing to note is that this number, as high as it is, is only one half of 1 percent of all of the blogs that are out there.

iD Tech has been pushing green issues for years. We know that we can help save power by turning off lights, computers, and monitors when we aren’t using our labs, and that reusing cups (by putting our name on them!) helps reduce waste. Did you bring in batteries or ink cartridges last year? Maybe a used cell phone or two?

If you have any more ideas on how to improve efficiency and reduce waste at camp, we want to hear them!

 

October 19th, 2009 | Posted in iD Tech Bloggers Submit a Comment »

 

 

iD Princeton ‘05 Reunion in NYC and Philly!

At iD Tech Camps we always say that our students will make friends that last a lifetime but I’d like to point out that the same is true for our staff as well! When I started with iD, back in the summer of ’05 I taught Web Design and Flash Animation out our heralded iD Princeton location. While there I made good friends with an international staff who was hired from Scotland, Andy aka “Wee Haggis”. Though I could barely understand a word he said, we quickly became close friends.

After working hard all week at camp, we’d take road trips all over the northeast coast touring the different parts of the country. In fact, he joined me the next camp season to drive across the country to work at iD UCLA, a road trip I’ll never forget!

I’m proud to say that we’ve remained good friends ever since and have visited each other just about every year. However, our most recent rendezvous was a special as his entire family came a long for the ride! I met up with them in New York City, then we all headed to Philadelphia. Here we are at the world famous Philadelphia Art Museum in front of the infamous “Rocky” statue. Andy and I are up top:

I found the only place NYC broadcasting the Scotland vs. Macedonia Football game, as it was not to be missed (my awesome Scotland Football jersey compliments of Andy’s fam) here we are in attendance:

PROTIP: Did you know the symbol depicted in the Scotish “Isle of Man” Flag (between Andy and I) is called a Triskelion

 

October 9th, 2009 | Posted in iD Tech Bloggers Submit a Comment »