Our Classes
Check Out Some of Our Class Options
Video Game Design
What’s better than playing video games? Making them! Students will learn how to design, program, and create the assets in their own video games. This is a great way to introduce your child to the career opportunities when they are familiar with technology. We will learn about:
• Intellectual Property
• Careers Related to the Video Game Industry
• Simple Storyboarding
• If/Then Commands and their Importance in Programming
• Creating Pixel Art with Animations Perfect for the beginner or the more experienced student.
Everyone gets to keep all of the games made in their class
ExoticGardening
Course Description: A hands-on course for kids who love growing things and have a fascination with plants! Students will learn about and even grow for themselves new types of plants from around the world they never knew existed; as we use lectures, videos, and demonstrations to introduce students to an array of pro-level tips and tricks as well as botanical info on how to greatly increase garden yields. Adding to the fun and excitement, we bring exotic and unique seeds for our students to grow, learn about, and take home. Classes are provided by our very own former master gardener with over 20 years of experience to provide insight and information to provide the secrets of the sages!
Some of our interesting lessons include the following:
- Gardening techniques 101. Getting more out of your garden with less!
- Plant care. Let’s talk about how to make plants into giants!
- History of various plants. Stories to introduce the rich cultural and or historical significance of some of the plants we will grow such as sacred white sage and Native American devil’s claw.
- Wild edible plants that can save your life.
Robotics
During the semester of Robotics classes, students are introduced to both robot building as well as programming. The students will build robots to accomplish a specific task while using their imagination to make their robots better and more capable. Creativity and imaginative thinking are encouraged to solve problems to complete their tasks. The semester culminates in an epic robot sumo battle on the last day of class. Parents are encouraged to come on this day to cheer the robots on to victory. Let the fun and excitement begin!!!
LEGO Engineering
The hunt is on for the next LEGO Master! This program is designed to get students inspired to use all their LEGO building knowledge to complete a series of building challenges that will be sure to spark their creativity and inspire them to learn more. We work in small teams, so students work on their communication and collaboration skills.
Photoshop / 3D Printing
Photoshop Portion: Students will learn all about Photoshop and how to make the most amazing designs. This is a practical skill that sets students up for future success.
3D Portion: Students will learn how to create their own intricate 3D designs and have the opportunity to print them to take home. As part of this course, students will learn how 3D printers work and their maintenance. At the end of the course, we will gift to the students the 3D printer they used in class! This allows them to continue creating at home.
Mad Scientist
(Hands-On Science & Engineering)
This program provides a project-based approach to learning about science. Students will marvel at the chemical reactions between bases and acids, solids and liquids, pH levels, and conduct cool experiments while learning about the importance of safety. We will also learn about concepts such as buoyancy, heat transfer, and electricity. We will be performing a lab/project at least every other week. Let’s get crazy with science!
Anatomy Focus: Skeletal System
An informative class to learn the basics of the human skeletal system, its functions, and its parts. We go through simple easy to follow worksheets, lecture, and discussion to cover the basic topics of:
●Basics of bones. What kind of bones do we have?
●What is the difference between my skeleton and an exoskeleton of a bug?
●Besides support, what does my skeleton do?
●Do bones make blood?
●How bones grow and how broken bones heal
●Can you replace bones with man-made ones?
●Are teeth bones?
Anatomy Focus: Cardiovascular
An informative class to learn the basics of the human heart. Its functions and its parts. We go through simple worksheets, lectures, and discussion to answer the basic topics of:
●What is a heart exactly?
●What does a heart do?
●What is blood?
●Where does blood come from?
●What are the parts of a heart?
●How does the heart work?
●How does the heart sustain itself?
●Can a heart repair itself?
●How does a heart know what to do?
Coding Basics: Minecraft Programming
No programming experience required! Students get creative by designing and programming their very own NPC “Non-Playable Character”. Students will get to choose and alter a basic base model “dummy” in Minecraft, then edit its appearance to make their own custom character. Then students will be instructed on how to bring their creation to life using controls and basic command / path-finding options. Kids can either make themselves a new friend in the game or even a new monster. Creativity and learning through free play and exploration is the key!
Content includes:
• What is an NPC?
• What kind of character or creature do you want?
• Let’s get to designing. Here we make and modify the creations.
• Creature factory! Now we give the students creations life.
• Everyone falls the first time! Students will learn quickly bugs are inevitable.
• Perfecting! We spend the day going over command results to make our creations behave the way we want them to.
• Free play with your new creations. Time for fun! Students now get to play Minecraft as normal, but now with their very real and active creations good or bad in the world with them.
Biology Focus: Ecosystems and the Circle of Life
A class designed to creatively show young students how and why life works. Why animals look the way they do and act the way they act. We also discuss how and why plants and animals work together and form a circle of life necessary for all to exist.
●The food chain -Humans eat everything.
●Energy flow -Humans still eat everything.
●Plants and animals that work together.
●Biomes
●Adaptations of life.
●The great cycle of life.
●Let’s draw our own creatures!
●Let’s draw our creatures a home!
●Let’s turn our creatures into a game and battle them to see whose creature is the most adaptive!
●Let’s reflect on what we learned about survival of the fittest or the most flexible! Bigger isn’t always better!
Biology Focus: Microbiology
A craft class that explains the basics of cells by engaging students creative play alone with lecture. These lectures cover a variety of topics such as:
●What is a cell and what do they do? Do I have cells?
●What are the parts of a cell?
●How do cells work?
●How do cells eat?
●Do cells use money? The answer might surprise you!
●When cells go to war! What is a virus?
●What are bacteria? Are they all bad?
●What cells have to do with ageing.
●Let’s make a model of a standard animal or plant cell!
●Let’s design our own custom cell!
Coding Basics: Intro to C++ and the Fundamentals of Programming
No programming experience required! Students explore the basics of how programming works using C++ coding.
Content includes:
• Understanding code and its purpose.
• Learning the basics of format and learning to use simple lines of basic code.
• Writing our first script
• Learning to use a compiler to make our first simple program
• Discovering what other things we can do
• Learning some good habits about protocol
• Creating some simple icons
• Altering a real video game!
Economics Focus: A Basic, Fun Economics Class to Learn the Fundamentals of Money and Trade
A fun hands-on class that teaches about money and trade. Students will learn about the origin of money and why currency is used. Then we set up a sandbox type play zone where everyone is assigned cards that signify real world resources as well as play money. The students are then tasked to make their own city but are not given everything they will need. They must then buy, trade, or negotiate with their classmates to build up their town.
A pretend market and auction house will be set up to act as a free market to buy additional resources with play money. Students will get extra play funds at the beginning of each class based on industries or taxes they set up. Students will quickly have to learn to budget, save, and invest money to keep going all the while learning about the financial industry!
Biology Focus: Eusocial Insects, Bees, Wasps, Terminates, and Ants!
A very fun light craft class that explains the basics of how colonial insects work and the different types and answer burning questions about interesting topics we well as learning about rare and exotic insects. Topics include:
●What is a social insect?
●Where do they come from?
●What are the caste systems?
●What is a queen?
●Life cycle of an individual ●Life cycle of a colony
●Do soldiers, workers, and queens have the same DNA?
●How do bees make honey?
●Do ants farm? Do they use tools?
●How social insects communicate and who’s really in charge?
●Let’s learn about some exotic species from around the world! ●Let’s draw our own social insect creations!
Information Technology 101
A course for students interested in the basics of computers and how they operate including hardware, software data storage, and maintenance. This class will also cover a brief history of computers and their hardware as well as notable software of the past.
- How computers work! Students learn the basics about computers and how they work. What is a GUI?
- How data is stored.
- When dinosaurs ruled the earth! We look at a floppy disk and learn about windows 95 and see the sights of the glorious past! Let’s play mine sweeper and listen to canyon! Yes, we will play Debussy’s Claire de Lune!
- C: \DOS C: \DOS\RUN RUN\DOS\RUN. Students learn about MS DOS and play “the incredible machine” on DOS! Your parents left you a beautiful heritage and a very colorful legacy! Let’s learn more about the early era.
- Hardware!
- We look at some new tech and see what has changed.
- Students learn some tricks and a bit about memory conservation. Here we will learn to use task manager and some basics on drives/control panel.
- Saving your own virtual life! We learn the most valuable lesson of all. The basics on how to back up your data and undo some unwanted changes. We learn how to use some basic features to circumvent future issues and resurrect some dead files.
- Deleted isn’t gone! Let’s learn some more advanced things about how deleted data is still there and why.
Thunder Rails! –The Rich History of our Great American Railways
Come along for an entertaining and educational ride as we cover the vibrant history of American and early British railroads using a mix of classic media, lecture presentations, historical footage, and hands-on activities. With firsthand accounts, stories, and folktales, brought to by your host (a former conductor and trolley driver), who will share insight and information on day-to-day railroad functions, including how to read REAL railroad signs and the basics of locomotive and trolley operations!
- How does a locomotive work? Let’s look inside and find out!
- History: The first trains.
- History: America’s journey west and the great logging trains of Sequoia.
- History: The Golden Era of travel and American giants of the rail.
- History: The Legendary Big Boy and the Atomic Trains.
- History: Trains go to war! The history of the great armored trains.
- Unique trains of the world!
- History: All about cabooses! The evolution of and why did they go away and why they are coming back! From brake vans to modern shoving platform cabooses.
- History: End of an era. Why steam gave way to diesel.
- It’s all about economics! Let’s learn how railroads operate!
- Rule of the road! Let’s learn how to read railroad signals!
- Let’s find out how trains and trolleys are controlled.
- Stories of the rail. Folklore legends and forgotten gandy dancer songs.
- History: Infamous crashes.
- History: That time a cat took over a railroad.
- Why trucks and planes failed to replace the train. And why the hyper loop was going to fail from the start.
Cricut Creators Club
Ever felt like making your own stickers? How about easily cutting a sewing pattern for making customized clothing? How about making a custom design for a shirt? Welcome to our Cricut Club where you can learn to create hundreds of things with one machine and one program. We will be using the professional model, which offers the best options and allows students to maximize their creativity. Together as a class we explore:
- Machine setup
- Machine troubleshooting
- Cutting permanent, temporary, and heat transfer vinyl
- Applying vinyl to items such as shirts, hats, lab coats
- Cutting fabric
- Foiling metal
- Writing and infusing ink
- How to set up and market yourself to sell all products you make
- And much more
Content Creators
Course Description: This course is perfect for the student who wants to start or improve his or her own content creation career. We will be covering a wide range of subjects, including:
- Content creation on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and more.
- Monetization
- Editing
- Creating and following deadlines
- Building your audience
- Intellectual property
- Community standards
- Basic video production techniques
- We focus on safety and privacy throughout
We can’t wait to see your talents.
Junior Coding/ Video Game Designing
What’s more fun than playing a video game? Making one! Students design and help program their own video games. Students will learn the basics of creating a video game in a simplified, age-appropriate curriculum. This is a great opportunity to introduce younger students to coding. Students learn about If/Then commands and how they are crucial to programming as they experiment with creation tools to make their characters within the video game. Students will get to take their games home at the end of the semester to share with their families!
Junior Coding/ Video Game Designing
What’s more fun than playing a video game? Making one! Students design and help program their own video games. Students will learn the basics of creating a video game in a simplified, age-appropriate curriculum. This is a great opportunity to introduce younger students to coding. Students learn about If/Then commands and how they are crucial to programming as they experiment with creation tools to make their characters within the video game. Students will get to take their games home at the end of the semester to share with their families!
Digital Drawing and Art w/Procreate
Course Description: In this hands-on class, your child will explore the endless possibilities of digital creativity through Procreate. From the basics of navigating the interface to mastering advanced drawing and painting techniques, each session is carefully crafted to inspire imagination and develop essential digital art skills, including:
- Introduction to Procreate: Familiarize young artists with the Procreate environment, tools, and features.
- Digital Canvas Exploration: Learn the fundamentals of creating, resizing, and manipulating digital canvases to suit artistic visions.
- Brush Techniques: Delve into the diverse array of brushes, understanding their applications and customizing settings for unique effects.
- Color Mastery: Discover the magic of color theory and experiment with Procreate’s color palette, gradients, and blending modes.
- Layer Magic: Unleash the power of layers for organizing artwork, creating depth, and experimenting with different elements.
- Drawing and Illustration: Develop drawing skills through step-by-step exercises, from basic shapes to intricate characters and scenes.
- Animation Basics: Introduce the basics of animation, allowing kids to bring their creations to life with simple yet captivating movements.
- Project Showcases: Encourage creativity with fun, themed projects that showcase the skills learned in class.
Baking for Fun
Course Description: A delightful and hands-on class where young bakers embark on a culinary journey filled with joy, creativity, and, of course, delicious treats! Our goal is to make baking an enjoyable and educational experience for your child, instilling a lifelong love for the art of creating sweet masterpieces.
Course Highlights:
- Get ready for a world of flour, sugar, and everything nice! Our classes begin with a warm welcome and an introduction to the exciting world of baking.
- Equip your child with fundamental kitchen skills, including measuring, mixing, and safe food handling, fostering confidence in the heart of the kitchen.
- Children will explore a variety of recipes that cater to their sweet tooth and expand their baking repertoire.
- Discover the science behind baking as we delve into the fascinating chemistry that transforms simple ingredients into mouthwatering delights.
- Foster camaraderie and teamwork through fun baking challenges that encourage collaboration and creativity.
- Emphasize the importance of kitchen safety, teaching kids to be mindful and responsible while enjoying their baking adventures.
Homestyle Italian Cooking
Course Description: Homestyle Italian Cooking for Kids is not just a cooking class; it’s an exploration of flavors, traditions, and the joy of creating something special with your own two hands. Join us on this culinary adventure and let the aroma of Italian goodness fill your kitchen! Experience a hands-on culinary journey where young aspiring chefs aged 8-12 embark on a flavorful adventure into the heart of Homestyle Italian Cooking. Our course is designed to introduce kids to the art and joy of creating delicious Italian dishes, fostering a love for authentic flavors and a lifelong appreciation for the culinary arts.
Latin American Cooking
Course Description: This is more than a cooking class; it’s a celebration of flavors, cultures, and the joy of creating delicious memories in the kitchen. Join us for an unforgettable culinary experience that will inspire a lifelong love for Latin American cuisine! It is an opportunity for students to explore the vibrant and diverse flavors of Latin American cuisine. In this hands-on cooking class, kids will embark on a flavorful adventure, discovering the unique tastes and cultural richness that make Latin American dishes so special.
Life Skills
Students will learn some of the basics of being an adult. We will build skills that will serve them well into adulthood, including how to build and shop on a budget, how credit works and how to raise your score, how to mend, properly clean, and store different types of clothing, how to build schedules to balance work and fun, and even some useful math calculations that can be beneficial in everyday circumstances.
Chess
Students will enjoy learning and playing this classic game of strategy. Mental discipline and good sportsmanship are encouraged. Skills taught range from basic checkmates to rudimentary tactics and strategies such as pins, forks, skewer attacks, opening traps, opening theory, pawn structure, etc. During tournament games, students are paired against opponents of similar strengths. All chess supplies are provided.
Little Robot Builders
In Little Robot Builders, students will learn by exploring the basic concepts of construction and programming a robot. Students will work together to follow simple instructions to build and program their robots. We work on skills such as attention to detail, keyboard and mouse use, communication, and collaboration which will help them in future classes all while they have fun building robots.
Painting
Students will explore many different mediums of art while learning to mix colors and use them properly to create depth and dimension. They will have the opportunity to create several art pieces to share with their friends and family that are perfect for display.
Drama Fun
This developmental drama course will include a wide range of creative and fun activities that promote the development of leadership, communication skills, and creative thinking. Classes will teach acting fundamentals like projection, articulation, dramatic movement, and improvisation while engaging in active and imaginative character-building and group scene work. Students will learn to encourage each other to express themselves through communication, creativity, and collaboration all while building confidence!
Fashion & Jewelry Design
Students will have a fun and exciting way to get exposed to the world of fashion design from how to sketch, pick colors and fabrics, and even learn basic sewing skills with machines. The possibilities are endless. During the second part of this class, students will be exposed to new ways of making and designing jewelry scaled for their age level.
- Students will learn basic sewing patterns and designs
- Students will learn machine basics and safety when sewing
- Students may learn how to wire wrap or build jewelry pieces
- Students will learn the basics of color theory and fabric picking
Costuming and Cosplay: Creating a Character
During this course, students are introduced to the art and science of prop-making and armor-building while learning about the history of cosplay. Students will learn about the importance of safety as they design, measure, and create their props and armor using the same tools many professionals use, including paint and weathering! As the semester progresses, students will develop the backstory for the character they want to portray. At the end of this exciting course, students will take home an amazing costume they created themselves. This is truly a rare opportunity for the budding cosplayer or anyone who wants to build a great set of costuming armor.
Trading Card/Strategy Games
In card game strategies students will work on critical thinking skills as their logical and reasoning skills are put to the test as they challenge their classmates in tournament-style play. Each class focuses on a new component of play terms and effects. Students will use and improve comprehension and mathematical reasoning as they must carefully read cards to understand the effect and potential benefits of their deck’s strategy and theme. This class will be challenging students to plan how cards might work together to improve their strategic thinking. We are taking learning and application in new directions within a fast-paced, fun environment where each student can excel in different ways.
Movie-Makers
This class will cover the basics of how to make a movie from start to finish. No experience is necessary! Students will learn how to write their own scripts, and storyboards, work with professional cameras, act in front of a camera, and much more! We will also be inviting guest speakers from the professional film industry to talk about what it takes to be a successful MOVIE MAKER!
At the end of the program, we organize a mini film festivl for students to show off their films to the community.
Conversational Spanish
Conversational Spanish is built for everyday practice. Get a jumpstart on a second language with our Spanish program built to entertain and educate children. The goal of this course will be for students to explore the Spanish language and culture, thus fostering an environment where students take pride in their growing language skills.
- Students will learn conversational and everyday language
- Class materials will engage students with games, videos, music, dance, film, food, and good conversation
- By the end of the course, students will participate in an activity to see how well they could function in a Spanish-speaking country
- Spanish showcase at the end of the semester, in which students get to demonstrate their skills, share their favorite parts of the class, and talk about their favorite Spanish-speaking country
Zoology
Course Description: This is not just a class; it’s an expedition into the wild realms of the animal kingdom. Join us for a journey of discovery, exploration, and a newfound appreciation for the incredible creatures that inhabit our Earth! Enjoy an engaging and educational course designed for curious minds who are eager to embark on a thrilling journey into the captivating world of animals! This class is crafted to instill a love for zoology, fostering a deep appreciation for the incredible diversity of creatures that share our planet.
Air Brushing
Course Description: Learn the ancient Chinese airbrushing techniques on how to paint 3-dimensional miniatures or other tangible items. This class is about artistic airbrushing. We can start with the basics of using the airbrush, cleaning the airbrush, and using paints and cleaners specifically designed to be used with the airbrush, along with preparing some other paints that are not initially designed to be airbrushed. We will be using top loaded dual action airbrushes from Iwata Eclipse, Neo, Badger Patriot to the Creos Procon. We will paint on various platforms from paper to canvas to miniatures using a 3 to 4 color minimum rules where they could enter a competition with a professional grade paint job.
