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Building robots during summer vacation beats watching TV or playing video games at home, said sixth-grader Jerman Rodriguez.
"At my house, you do the same things over and over," he said. "Here, every day you do something different."
During the past two weeks, about 80 students met at either Hilton Head International Baccalaureate or Bluffton elementary schools to design, program and control robots built from a kit developed by Lego. They also learned to use computer-animation programs.
Although the free camp was open to any Beaufort County School District student, it was specifically promoted to those with limited English proficiency, said Sarah Owen, who coordinates English for Speakers of Other Languages programs for the district. About half of the attending students' native language is not English, Owen said.
Many of those students learn best when they work with other students with visual and hands-on material, Owen said.
"It's been great to see some students who are still struggling with the language interacting and working cooperatively with other students," she said. "A lot of my ESOL students really flourish in situations like this."
The camp was a joint effort of the school district and Georgia Tech in Savannah and introduced students in grades four through eight to the basics of computer science and engineering.
Georgia Tech provided the equipment and trained teachers to lead the camp. The district paid an administrator, two teachers and bilingual liaisons to translate and to work with students at a cost of less than $10,000, Owen said.
Parker Owen, a Savannah teacher trained through Georgia Tech to lead the camp, said that when it comes to computers, this generation of students learns fast.
"They can just soak this stuff up," he said. "I'm the teacher, and I spend a lot of time going up to kids and saying, 'Wow. How'd you do that?' "
