There are two reasons families book a STEM camp, and they are not the same reason.

One is childcare. School is out, work is not, and the week needs to be covered by something better than a screen. That is a completely legitimate reason and nobody should feel odd about it.

The other is that your kid liked something — took a thing apart, got interested in how a game worked — and you want to see whether it goes anywhere.

Camps that serve the first reason well often serve the second one badly, and the marketing for both looks identical. Here is how to tell them apart.

Camp season is not just summer. Four windows matter here:

• Summer, July and August. Registration opens as early as January, and the popular ones fill by March.
• Spring break, two weeks in March. Registration usually opens in January.
• Winter break, late December. Fewer options, books late.
• Pro-D days, scattered through the year. Single days, often overlooked, and the hardest childcare gap to fill.

If you are reading this in the fall, the useful action is not booking summer yet. It is putting a reminder in your calendar for January, which is when the good options open and quietly close.

Camps do one thing that longer programs cannot: they are a cheap, low-risk way to find out whether your kid is interested in something.

A week costs you a week. If they hate it, you have learned something useful for a modest price. If they love it, you have a direction that was not obvious before.

That test is the real value. Treat a camp as a probe rather than an education.

Here is the part the brochures leave out.

A week is not long enough for anything to get difficult.

Most learning in technical work happens after the initial enthusiasm fades, when the thing does not work and you have to figure out why. That moment usually arrives in week three. A five-day camp ends before it.

Most camps are built around guaranteed success.

With one week and a room of kids of mixed ability, the practical solution is a kit with a known outcome. Everyone finishes, everyone has something to take home, everyone’s parent is happy at pickup. It is a reasonable design decision. It also means the child practiced following instructions.

The take-home object is not evidence of learning.

A working robot at the end of the week tells you the kit worked. It does not tell you your child understands why.

None of this makes camps bad. It makes them a first step rather than a destination.

1. What is the ratio? Ask for instructor-to-camper numbers, not “small groups.” Eight to one is a different experience from twenty to one.
2. Who is actually in the room? Many camps are staffed by university students on summer contracts. That can be excellent — they are close in age and genuinely enthusiastic. But ask, so you know what you are buying.
3. Is the age range narrow or wide? A camp advertised for ages 8 to 14 is going to aim somewhere in the middle. Your 8-year-old will be lost and your 14-year-old will be bored.
4. Does everyone build the same thing? Not a disqualifier, but it tells you what kind of camp it is. If the answer is yes, it is an introduction. If different campers make different things, there is more room to think.
5. What is the screen time? Ask directly. Some coding camps are six hours a day in front of a monitor, which for a younger child in July is a lot.
6. What is the total cost? Materials, extended care, take-home kits, and late pickup fees are often separate. Ask for the full number.
7. What happens after? The best answer is that there is a next step — a term program, a club, something to continue with. A camp that ends with nothing to do next wastes whatever interest it created.

Ages 6–9. Short attention spans, wide interests. Variety beats depth. Do not pay for specialist instruction at this age; pay for a good environment and enough adults.

Ages 10–13. The window where interest either takes hold or does not. Worth being pickier. Look for camps where campers make choices rather than follow steps.

Ages 14–17. Most general camps are too young for this group, and many teenagers quietly know it. If your teen has real interest, a term-length program will serve them far better than another week of kits. If they are unsure, one focused camp is a fair test.

If your child has never tried anything technical, book a camp. It is the right amount of risk for an unknown, and a week is not a big commitment for either of you.

If they have already done two or three and still light up about it, stop booking camps. They are past the probe stage. What they need next is something long enough to get hard — a term program where a project can fail and be fixed, with the same group of people, and an adult who knows their work well enough to say something useful about it.

That is a different purchase, and it is the one that changes things.

We run camps in Vancouver and Richmond, and we run cohort programs for students in grades 6 through 12.

We tell families the same thing written above: if you are not sure yet, start with a camp. If you already know, the cohort is where the real work happens.