Yesterday (Thursday, June 18th) was the last day of my first week of my summer STEM camp series, and I wanted to document my student computer setups before I forget the details. I recorded the attached video (10 min) to share these details. I think it's my most streamlined summer computer lab workflow ever for managing student stations with upper elementary kids, and it worked great.
This week I ran two camps: Amazing Animal Websites in the morning, where students built Google Sites with pictures, video, text, and links (including the fantastic Glide Show feature in Adobe Express), and Coding in Space with Minecraft in the afternoon. I first started teaching summer camps for kids with Minecraft Education back in 2020. With groups of six and seven third, fourth, and fifth graders sitting in an island configuration on gaming PCs, I made an important decision: I would handle all the logins myself for these camps this week.
Password entry at this age can be painful for everyone. Shift keys, caps lock, handwritten credentials from parents that kids can’t decipher under pressure. Add multi-factor authentication and you’ve burned 20 minutes before anyone has done anything creative. Eliminating that friction made this week wonderful.
I want to note this process is NOT something I would do with students during the ‘regular academic year.’ However, summer camp settings like these are different. Later this summer when I teach a Scratch Coding Camp, I WILL work with parents so they and their child can create a working Scratch community login PRIOR to camp. For this week, however, that wasn’t needed.
My workflow for each student computetr workstation was as follows:
Log in to the Windows student account.
Launch Minecraft with a unique camp account (shared servers require individual logins, and I turned off MFA entirely for camp use)
Open Chrome and sync it to our shared Google camp account.
Open up our “Time for Listening” slideshow.
That shared Chrome account was the biggest timesaver. Bookmarks sync automatically, so every student has a bookmarks toolbar “Time for Listening” screensaver slideshow link, the link to our camp website / daily curriculum, and their personal Google Site ready the moment they sat down. One wrinkle worth noting: Our school lab computers use Deep Freeze, which wipes all student data on restart, so planning where students save their work is essential. This software is GREAT to use in some school computer lab settings, but not all. We used it when I was the Director of Technology at Casady School from 2015-2019 in OKC, and it is absolutely worth the money if it’s function fits instructional needs.
My “Time for Listening” slideshow / screensaver has been a game-changer for managing attention during instruction, during camps and during the regular school year. In a computer lab when I need all students to pay attention to my instructions, I require all my students open the slideshow, in full-screen mode. This might not work as well for older high school or college students, but for elementary and middle school students it works great for me. When I’ve taught at other schools and colleges I’ve sometimes had access to “screen control / lab management'“ software, and that can be nice. This technique is a low-tech alternative, but none-the-less effective.
My full curriculum for all my campus this summer is available on lessons.wesfryer.com. My spouse’s camps are also listed, and some are linked to her curriculum too. Her “Rocket Camp” curriculum is available on her website.
Learn more about Shelly and my summer STEM camps by checking out episode 41 of our “Wes and Shelly Share” podcast! (Also on YouTube)
AI Attribution: I used Claude AI (by Anthropic) to help draft this post from the video transcript, and edited it before publishing.
