Four-Saturday camp
Winter Coding Camp 2026
Four Saturday mornings at the Allen ISD STEAM Center, where students in grades 3 through 8 built a robot kit and programmed it to drive, draw, and solve a maze.
Last updated August 6, 2026
The details
- Grades
- Grades 3–8
- Dates
- January 31 – February 21, 2026
- Location
- Allen ISD STEAM Center, Allen, TX
- Cost
- $50 enrollment fee, covering the robot kit and all supplies
- Scholarships
- Fee waivers were available for qualified families. Families asked the Eaglets inbox; no documentation of need was requested on the public form.
- Registration deadline
- January 29, 2026
- Attendance
- All four Saturdays were expected. The sessions built on each other, so a student who missed one arrived at the next with an unfinished robot.
Session schedule
Each session builds on the last.
- 01Saturday, January 31 · 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM CST · First session
- 02Saturday, February 7 · 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM CST
- 03Saturday, February 14 · 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM CST
- 04Saturday, February 21 · 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM CST · Final session
The 2026 Winter Coding Camp ran for four Saturday mornings at the Allen ISD STEAM Center, returning to the venue where Eaglets runs its Allen-area programming.
Students worked through the same arc the Camp Code curriculum uses: what electricity is and why a circuit has to close, what each component on the breadboard does, and then how to write code that makes the robot act on it. By the final Saturday, students were programming their robots to drive a set distance, draw with a marker, and use the distance sensor to decide when to turn inside a maze.
What shifted, and why
The camp was originally scheduled to start on Saturday, January 24. A winter storm was forecast for that weekend, and the team moved the whole schedule back by a week rather than ask families to travel. The first session became January 31, and the registration deadline moved to January 30 so late registrations were still possible.
That is the kind of decision worth recording. Every session in a multi-week camp depends on the one before it, so moving the series was the option that kept the camp whole.
Questions about this program
Did students keep the robot?
Yes. The $50 enrollment fee covered the kit and every supply used during the camp, and the robot went home with the student.
Did students need their own laptop?
No. A laptop was provided for each student during the session.
What if a student had never coded before?
That was the expected starting point. The camp begins with what electricity is and what a wire does, and reaches programming only once the robot is built.