Multi-day summer camp
Camp Code 2025
A past program. Eaglets students helped bring student-built robot kits and hands-on instruction to participating Texas communities through a Texas Workforce Commission-funded initiative with BEST of Texas Robotics.
Last updated August 6, 2026
The details
- Grades
- Grades 3–8
What Camp Code was
Camp Code was a summer robotics program delivered across participating Texas communities in 2025. During Camp Code 2025, Eaglets students helped bring hands-on robotics instruction to those communities through a Texas Workforce Commission-funded initiative with BEST of Texas Robotics. Students used custom-built robots, learned programming and electronics, and worked through engineering challenges guided by student instructors.
The student-led role
Eaglets contributed the parts of the program students own end to end:
- The physical robot kit, designed and refined by student engineers
- Curriculum and activity plans written for students in grades 3 through 8
- Student instructors who taught the sessions
- Volunteer preparation and day-of program support
The robot kit and curriculum
Campers worked with a kit built around a microcontroller, a pair of DC motors, a distance sensor, and a breadboard, mounted on a laser-cut chassis with custom 3D-printed parts. The curriculum moved from assembly to wiring to code, so that every programming concept had a physical result a camper could watch happen.
Challenges included driving a set distance, making repeatable turns, reacting to sensor input, and diagnosing a circuit that was not behaving as expected.
What students did
Campers assembled the robot themselves rather than receiving a finished machine. They wired the breadboard, loaded their own programs, ran the robot through challenges, found the point where it failed, and changed something. That loop, build, run, find the fault, revise, was the program.
Lessons learned
Running a multi-site summer program taught the team as much as it taught the campers: how long assembly really takes with a room of third graders, which wiring steps need a jig rather than an instruction, how many spare motors a site needs on hand, and how to write a lesson plan another student instructor can pick up and teach.
Where it ran
The schedule Eaglets announced for summer 2025 covered six Texas communities:
| Dates | Community |
|---|---|
| May 27–29 | Carrollton |
| June 2–5 | Chillicothe |
| June 16–20 | Lancaster |
| June 23–26 | DeSoto |
| June 23–26 | Harlandale |
| July 7–10 | El Paso |
Diboll ISD also hosted a camp, covered by KTRE at the start of August.
What it cost a family
Nothing, at every partner site outside Allen. The organization’s own 2026-2027 sponsorship packet is explicit that the camps hosted in communities across the state were free for students to attend, and that the fee-paying sessions were the ones at the Allen ISD STEAM Center.
That split is the program’s design, not an accident of scheduling: grant funding covers the camps that travel to underserved communities, and the Allen sessions carry a modest enrollment fee with waivers available.
Public coverage
Camp Code was covered by several Texas outlets. Their reporting, not internal estimates, is the source for what is stated publicly about the program’s scale. See the news and press page for the full list with links.
Partners and attribution
Camp Code was a Texas Workforce Commission-funded initiative with BEST of Texas Robotics. Eaglets contributed student-created camps, robot kits, curriculum, and instruction.