Below The Surface

By Jessie Forand/ECHO

He’s most often found at a large wooden table in ECHO’s staff office. Tinkering, testing, gluing. STEM Education Coordinator Chris Whitaker brings a sense of pure excitement, and now he is ready to share it with ECHO campers for the first time.

“The way I look at camps is as a way to get kids invested and interested in science in a really authentic way,” he said. This means presenting them with engaging challenges that rarely have one answer.

A former middle school science teacher, Whitaker said at ECHO he has the freedom to bring his hands-on ideas to life and the resources to make them attractive to budding creators.

The children who spend their time at ECHO bring an amazing creative energy to Whitaker’s public programming, he said, which sparks his own enthusiasm as they work together.

Kids don’t yet possess the self-consciousness that adults learn over time, Whitaker said, so they aren’t afraid to try, to fail, and to remedy things that don’t work out.

The work is done not in a classroom environment, rather in a unique setting where participation is authentic and done for the joy of trying and learning. And the beauty of camp offerings, he said, is that things are done through ECHO’s environmental lens.

This year’s summer offerings were recently announced, and they include everything from a Lego robots mission to save the lake to Jedi science wars, rock collectors for young geologists and animal adventurers for zoologists in training.

Other outside-the-box thinkers can join Whitaker and the rest of ECHO’s incredible camp staff for vacation or summer camps.