Camps provide a substantial opportunity for youth to develop important life skills. Identifying and training staff on critical competencies are essential to achieving the desired outcomes for camp participants. The purpose of this study was to determine the most critical competencies of the 4-H residential camp staff for achieving high staff…

Jewish summer camps must hire quality counselors each year. Staff retention is crucial to achieving the mission of Jewish camping; the challenge is that it is often a struggle to retain counselors for more than one to two summers. This study aimed to understand and increase counselor retention for young Gen Z staff, ages 18-22, beyond one to two…

The world of extracurricular learning spaces unjustifiably falls outside the scope of mainstream educational research: resources that focus on researching extracurricula are few and far between. In the arena of extracurricular activities, one continuously encounters phenomena such as dynamic shifts in individual and collective development, sudden…

Background: Self-perception is an important internal resource, and violence exposure can negatively impact children's view of themselves. Although camp interventions can enhance self-perception, research has not yet examined whether camp interventions improve self-perception among children affected by family violence. Camp-based interventions…

The camp community understands that participation in camp produces a variety of impacts; what is less understood are the causal mechanisms leading to outcomes. In the past, research on the camp experience treated causal mechanisms as monolithic; this commentary argues that a weakness in existing camp research is the assumption that…

Background: Despite representing half of approximately 1.5 million camp counsellors in the United States, women in outdoor experiential education (OEE) continually face barriers that constrain them to lead according to restrictive gendered expectations. While scholars have studied this issue across a variety of OEE contexts, summer day camps are…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between students' engagement with Legends of Learning's Math Basecamp (MBC) and students' math achievement at the elementary school level in Rialto Unified School District (RUSD) in California. Researchers examined the association between MBC usage and student achievement scores on the…

To explore the benefits of a brief autism education intervention on peer engagement and inclusion of autistic children at day camps. A convergent, parallel, two-arm (intervention/no intervention), non-randomized, mixed-methods design was used. The individualized, peer-directed, 5--10 min intervention included four components: (1) diagnostic label,…

This study aims to explore the middle schoolers' common naive conceptions of AI and the evolution of these conceptions during an AI summer camp. Data were collected from 14 middle school students (12 boys and 2 girls) from video observations and learning artifacts. The findings revealed 6 naive conceptions about AI concepts: (1) AI was the same as…

Summer camps in the United States operate in different contexts and formats to attract and serve youth with varying backgrounds. Overall, they currently serve more White, able-bodied, middle- to upper-class youth than youth of color, LGBTQ+ youth, youth with differing physical abilities, and other diverse identities (American Camp Association,…

Perhaps one of the most formalized ways that 4-H has fostered agricultural innovation and practical education has been through their outdoor youth education program, more commonly known as 4-H Camp. Although 4-H Camps were first created for local clubs, camping events soon expanded to the state and national levels. In fact, three years after…

Background: Summer camp is an experiential learning setting that supports youth development. Due to high fees, youth from low-income backgrounds often have fewer opportunities to attend. Subsequently, there is little literature about these youth's camp experiences. Purpose: This research examined growth and the characteristics supporting growth in…

Summer camps are an $18 billion industry while providing over 14,000 individual programs in the United States in 2015. Camp counselors, like other outdoor workers, are at risk of occupational solar exposure. Occupational solar exposure increases an individual's lifetime accumulation of solar radiation, leading to skin damage and higher rates of…

Designers in out-of-school spaces often negotiate the meaning of mathematics as part of the design process, determining what to include in classes and exhibits both implicitly and explicitly. This analysis suggests that instead of keeping these conversations behind the scenes, we should foreground them for participants. In doing so, we may…

This study was carried out within the scope of a nature education and science camp project. It aimed to investigate the effects of STEM activities conducted in out-of-school environments on teachers' STEM awareness and 21st-century skills. The research was designed according to the explanatory sequential pattern of the mixed method, and the…