This was one of those low-key, low expectation weekend activities that ended up being much more fun than we thought it was going to be. Cay heard about Beam Camp and found that they were holding an event in a warehouse loft in Carrol Gardens. The camp seems cool and geared toward a budding inventor. It was a one day event with lots of interesting Bishopp-age activities. Even though this was not geared as much towards Nate he was not going to be left home.
We had a beautifully sunny albeit cold day. The loft had huge windows and a spot by the sunny window was a fine place to be. They had an informal Lego area set up near the windows and Nate found himself a good spot early on.
We signed Bishopp up for a couple of activities including how to make a video game controller, how to make a glove that lights up LED's at the end of your finger, which is then used to create virtual digital paintings. Decidedly a tough concept to explain, but very cool to experience.
Throughout the day they were also setting up Rube Goldberg Machine. There was a master plan but the kids could help out where ever they wanted. One of the master workers took Nate under his wing for a little while.
We also got to see some of the older teenage kids play a new game called 'The Ninja Game.' Pretty cool, in a totally band-camp kind of way. I'll leave it to the reader to conduct their own google search as I did not find the definitive link on the matter.
The game controller thing was really cool. Each participant created a simple switch that could control one action of an old Mario game. Then you'd form teams of three to make one complete controller (forward, back, jump) and see how far you could get.
The light-glove project was involved but when finished and used with the special camera they had hooked up to a computer could great great digital art on the screen just by waving your hand around and turning on different color LED's at the end of each finger tip. Even though it was quite in Nate's age range I managed to get him involved as well.
We spent a good part of the day there; much longer than anticipated. Unfortunately we couldn't stay to see the completed Rube Goldberg machine, but it was a great Dad-kid outing.
