When Janerl Lampson began planning summer programming for California’s Panama-Buena Vista Union School District, she knew the logistics alone would be complicated. At one site, nearly 450 students would cycle through multiple camps each day, ranging from transitional kindergarten to seventh grade. Some students would attend for six weeks. Others might show up for a single day.
Designing activities that worked for that kind of schedule required more than a standard lesson plan. “We had kids that could come one day here, one day there,” Lampson explains. “So whatever we did had to work as a complete experience in a single day.”
To make it work, Lampson partnered with Pitsco to introduce daily STEM projects, hands-on builds students could complete, experiment with, and take home before the day ended.
A Summer Program With Many Moving Parts
At the time, Lampson was helping oversee a large and complex summer structure. While the district typically operated across 22 school sites during the year, summer looked very different. Eight sites served students from across the district, and each site ran multiple camp formats at once.
There were six-week theme camps for students committed to attending every day, week-by-week camps built around rotating themes, and a daily camp where students could attend whenever families needed care. That daily camp created a unique planning challenge. Students might come one day, skip the next, and return later in the week. Activities couldn’t depend on continuity.
“We had to be very cognizant about the lessons and making sure that it wasn’t something that was going to go more than one day,” Lampson explains. That need for flexibility made hands-on STEM a strong fit. With the right materials and lesson planning, each day could stand on its own while still giving students something meaningful to make and take home.
Creating a STEM Experience Students Could Jump Into Any Day
At Lampson’s site, the scale of the program was especially large. Her sports camp was the district’s most popular, and at one point she was serving around 450 students across all three camp models at her location. To make daily STEM feasible at that scale, Lampson worked closely with Education Advisor, Jacquelin, at Pitsco to identify lessons that could be delivered in manageable, self-contained chunks.
Together, they selected projects that could be used in the daily camp and then built another layer for the week-long science camp, where students spent mornings learning science content and afternoons returning to hands-on STEM activities designed to connect back to those concepts.
For the daily camp, the goal was simple: every student should be able to come in that day and make something. Lampson recalls, “I said, ‘Okay, we’re going to do a day camp. Every single day the kids had the opportunity to come and create a STEM project.’”
Delivering What the Program Needed
For Lampson, one of the biggest strengths of the partnership was how intentionally the lessons were matched to the structure of the camp. Daily camp projects needed to be engaging, manageable, and complete in a single session. Week-long camp projects needed to support science learning in a more connected way.
That level of customization mattered and as Lampson said, “They delivered. Pitsco definitely delivered exactly what we needed them to do.”
That support also made a difference for staff. Summer and afterschool programs don’t always have the same kind of instructional staffing as the regular school day. In many cases, paraprofessionals were leading activities, and their experience levels varied, but over time, the materials helped staff build confidence too. Lampson noted, “by the third week, a lot of them were saying, ‘Oh, I kind of like this. I’m kind of getting into this.’”
As they became more comfortable, staff members started getting more creative with the materials, stretching lessons further and reusing leftover supplies in new ways. That adaptability turned out to be one of the program’s lasting benefits.
A Program That Kept Going After Summer Ended
The value of the materials didn’t stop when the summer session ended.
Lampson later worked with Pitsco to inventory the remaining supplies and identify ways those materials could continue to support STEM learning during the school year. Instead of packing everything away, the district was able to keep using the lessons and leftover components in other program formats. For a district working with large numbers of students and limited resources, that kind of carryover mattered.
It also reinforced one of the qualities Lampson appreciated most about the experience: the materials were designed to be used, reused, and adapted.
Why Hands-On Learning Mattered So Much
For Lampson, one of the most important outcomes of the program had nothing to do with convenience or logistics. It was about giving students the chance to work with real materials in a way they often don’t during the regular school day.
“Kids do not do enough creative building with materials like back in the day,” she says.
That kind of open-ended building experience stood out to her, especially for younger students. She described how meaningful it was to watch children think through small but important questions while creating: what fits here, what happens if this goes there, why didn’t that work?
For older students, the hands-on work mattered just as much. It gave them a chance to step away from screens, stretch their thinking, and experiment with materials in a way that encouraged both creativity and reasoning.
“I love the fact that we gave kids the opportunity to build and be creative with materials and take different materials and make different things and then explain them,” Lampson says. “I absolutely love that.”
Reaching Students in New Ways
Lampson also saw firsthand how hands-on STEM could reach students who might not have connected as easily with other parts of camp. One student, originally signed up for sports camp, ended up spending time in the STEM-focused camp and quickly realized she wanted more of it.
“She had so much fun with building and doing all that,” Lampson says. “She’s like, ‘I don’t want to be in sports camp anymore.’” For students like that, the activities did more than fill the day. They opened up a different side of learning, one rooted in creativity, experimentation, and making.
“It really grabbed those kids that love the creative side of doing things like that,” Lampson says. “It fed their inner creativity so much and they so enjoyed it.”
Helping Students Work Through Frustration
The materials also created opportunities for a different kind of growth: learning how to respond when something didn’t work the first time.
Lampson described how hands-on activities can help students learn to name a problem, think through what is happening, and begin working toward a solution. That process is valuable not only for STEM learning, but for emotional regulation and independence as well.
“That is a skill that kids today, with their instant ‘I need satisfaction,’ don’t have. And I think that this tactical learning that you get with these kinds of materials helps kids understand that process, and it makes them better students, better able to handle relationships and emotions if they’re able to stop and think through, ‘Why is this happening? What can I do to fix it? Do I need to ask for help?’”
For her, those moments of struggle were part of the point. Students weren’t just building projects. They were building the ability to pause, reflect, ask questions, and keep going.
More Than a Summer Activity
Looking back, Lampson sees the success of the program in both practical and personal terms.
The projects worked because they fit the structure of the camp. They worked because staff could learn them, use them, and keep using them. But they also worked because they gave students something many of them were missing: the chance to make, create, problem-solve, and discover what they could do.
When asked what advice she would offer other educators planning similar programs, Lampson pointed to balance.
“The most important thing is to give kids opportunities without too many parameters, but enough parameters that the learning is happening,” she says.
That balance of structure and freedom helped turn summer camp into something much bigger than childcare or enrichment. It became a place where students could think, build, test ideas, and surprise themselves.
And sometimes, that starts with something as simple as the right materials in the right moment and an adult who knows what those materials can make possible.