Summer workforce center camp provides both fun and learning for campers

CARROLL — Summer camp is supposed to be fun and educational for the kids who attend. This summer's camp at the Fairfield County Workforce Center for local students learning about various trades was apparently just that.

About 80 to 100 campers attended the various week-long camps. Last week's Mad Science Builders and Healthcare Heroes camps were the last camps of the year. The former camp was related to the construction and skilled trades industries.

A previous camp touched on robotics. The camps primarily were for those in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades and some students attended multiple camps. A few high school students also participated.

"The point of the program is to just kind of expose the kids to career exploration," career navigator Karie Stone said. "When the kids come here on the first day of camp I tell them, 'You're here for fun. But you're also here to learn about different career fields.'"

MORE: Fairfield County Workforce Center to receive $500,000 from state to expand its lab

The students attended class for four days and then gave a presentation on Fridays about what they learned. A typical day went from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and includes a lot of hands-on training. For example, last week in the healthcare class the students were learning how to draw blood from an artificial arm, along with learning cardiopulmonary resuscitation on dolls.

Lancaster High School freshman Alexander Woltz took the robotics course earlier this summer and last week took the Mad Science Builders class. He learned about electrical currents in the robotics class and how to hook up wires, among other things.

For the construction class, Woltz learned about trucks and carpentry. He said he would like to be a programmer at NASA someday, and that the camp helped him learn what machines he would use there and how to program them.

Coltyn Anderson will be a seventh-grader at Amanda Junior High School. He took the robotics, construction and healthcare classes. Anderson said he enjoyed building things in the construction class like a cornhole game, birdhouse, water filter and a candy dispenser. 

For the robotics class he helped build a solar-tracking robot that can also charge a phone.

Both Woltz and Anderson said they enjoyed the summer camping experience.

Classes at the workforce center are designed to give students an option of gaining a certificate to begin their career or to continue their educational path toward a degree at Hocking College or Ohio University. Areas of focus include carpentry, electrical, HVAC, advanced manufacturing, and nursing.

The workforce center is located at 4465 Coonpath Road NW.

jbarron@gannett.com

740-681-4340

Twitter: @JeffDBarron