Fay Jones School Offers In-Person and Virtual Design Camp Options in Summer 2021

This summer, the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design is offering five different sessions of Design Camp, including several virtual options and an in-person camp on the U of A campus in Fayetteville. The in-person camp is already filled, but online registration for the other camps is available on the school's website.

Design Camp offers students a chance to learn about architecture and design and to explore what those look like as potential future careers. Each session of Design Camp incorporates the three disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and interior design and offers projects that include all three design areas. Students have the chance to learn new skills, including sketching and observation, how to analyze a site, and how to approach a design problem from conception and early ideation through completion, most often in the form of scale models and drawings.

For the 2021 virtual camps, the school collaborated with PBS Learn, the online educational platform for Arkansas PBS, to develop six days of virtual design camp education courses.

Last year when the pandemic shut down the Design Camps planned for 2020, Alison Turner, the school's director of community education, worked to convert all the lessons students normally learned in the camp into a series of 25 educational videos. These FAY Design Virtual Education videos were shared on the Fay Jones School's YouTube channel in July and August last year.

A grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation provided the means to create and produce the video series. Additional support for the videos came from the U of A Student Success Center and the Dean's Office of the Fay Jones School.

Turner explained that the PBS Learn platform being used this summer "incorporates all of the FAY Design Virtual Education videos that we created during summer 2020 as well as embedded projects and discussion boards."

For the self-guided camp, students can take the PBS Learn courses at their own pace and on their own schedule. These courses are recommended for students going into seventh through 12th grades.

There will be two week-long, school-guided virtual Design Camp sessions held June 14-18 and June 21-25. These sessions are open to students going into seventh through 12th grades. During these camps, students will use the PBS Learn courses and will meet daily via Zoom sessions with school design faculty and students for discussions, feedback and guidance.

A two-week advanced virtual Design Camp will be held June 14-25 for students going into 11th and 12th grades. These students will also use a mix of the PBS Learn courses and daily Zoom sessions with school design faculty and students. This extended camp will allow students who already have design experience to dive deeper into design concepts and work on more advanced projects.

An in-person Design Camp will be held June 14-18 at Vol Walker Hall at the U of A for students going into ninth through 12th grades. This camp will operate under COVID-19 directives of the Arkansas Department of Health, the state of Arkansas and the U of A.

"Due to the pandemic, we have had to reduce the number of in-person campers that we can accommodate, but we will still have one week of in-person Design Camp," Turner said. "During this week, students will be required to wear masks, and we will be spacing the desks in the studio spaces to meet the required social distancing indoors."

Other precautions this year include serving individually wrapped boxed lunches and snacks, and going on field trips that are within walking distance from the U of A to avoid traveling on crowded buses, Turner said. Additionally, the in-person camp will be offered as a day camp only this year with no option for overnight housing.

All of the virtual Design Camps are free and open to all students. Students in the virtual camp sessions can choose to purchase an optional materials kit for $30. The in-person Design Camp is costs $375, with need-based full and partial scholarships available. Materials and lunch are provided during the in-person camp.

Although the camp format is a little different this year, these changes are providing some exciting opportunities to share free design education with a larger audience beyond students in Arkansas. It underscores the idea that design is for everyone.

"The virtual camps allow us to meet students from all over the world," Turner said. "It allows us to expose campers to even more than we are able to do in person, since we can connect to professionals from all over the country to meet with the campers in the virtual environment."

Registration is required for all camps. The deadline to register is May 28 for the school-guided virtual camps and Aug. 1 for the self-guided virtual camp courses. More details and registration links can be found on the Design Camp page on the school's website.

For more information, contact Alannah Massey at faycamp@uark.edu.