Kids' Classes & Camps

Item Description

Beam Camp is honored to offer a 4-week session for the summer of 2011 for a camper aged 7 - 17.

The 2011 session dates are Session 1 (Wednesday, June 29 - Sunday, July 24); Session 2 (Wednesday, July 27 - Sunday, August 21).

Beam Camp is an overnight summer program for boys and girls aged 7-17 in Strafford, New Hampshire. At Beam kids learn to make their ideas happen through fine and manual arts, technology and collaboration. Every summer campers collaborate on the spectacular Beam Project and engage with our full-time and visiting staff of professional architects, videographers, builders, engineers, designers, and makers of all kinds. They learn the tools, techniques and temperaments of creation to apply to their own plots, plans and schemes. They transform ideas into artifacts and personal achievement into community success.

The centerpiece of each camp session is The Beam Project, a large-scale collaborative endeavor that campers plan, produce and play with. Beam selects a different distinguished artist, architect or general big thinker as Project Master to conceive each summer’s Project. At summer’s end we invite all Beam Parents and Family to join us at camp for a celebration the Project’s completion.

Every week, each camper chooses to explore a new Domain, in-depth, hands-on, discovery activities in the arts, sciences, cultural, athletic or cultural fields. They work closely with a Beam Guide or visiting expert to explore disciplines, techniques or projects in smaller groups. Domains cover as wide a territory as you can imagine. We've made short movies, built a catapult, launched hot air balloons, built wilderness shelters, developed circuitry, studied kung fu and built traditional Balinese gamelan instruments, fashioned costumes to go along with famous fairy tales, built rowboats from branches and tarps, performed in improv noise bands, built solar cookers and cooked dinner in them, knitted bags, produced plays we wrote... you name it, we do it, and we show kids how to too.

2011 BEAM PROJECTS 
Proposed by art/architecture team Wignall & Moore of London, England, the July Beam Project (session dates: June 29 - July 24) will be The Story of Machines That Never Flew, an aerial installation of fantastic aircraft dreamed up by thinkers and dreamers, ancient and modern. Beam campers and staff will construct and document their building of a collection of distinct mechanical and sculptural inventions to tell the stories of the designers whose imaginations soared but whose creations never left the ground.

For the camp’s August Beam Project (session dates: July 27 - August 21), Beam campers and staff will collaborate with architecture students at the University of Kassel, Germany to build pragmatopia’s The Habitats of Parker Mountain, human-sized interpretations of animal habitats. The international team will design and assist the campers in building animal abodes to suit the needs and nature of the wildlife of southern New Hampshire but for the use and enjoyment of all Beam Camp’s inhabitants, human and animal.

We find each summer’s Beam Projects through a Call for Project Proposals. Once selected, the Beam Staff guides and assists the Project Masters to further develop, design, plan, prototype and blueprint their ideas into the Projects that the campers will realize this summer.

Item Special Note

In addition to the 4-week session auction item, Beam Camp is honored to make the following offer to members of the P.S. 29 community. Register your child for a Beam session in 2011 and receive a 5% discount for yourself and we'll contribute 5% of the tuition price to the school