2025 Course List

Unleash your creativity in this fun, hands-on one-week pottery class! Whether you're new to clay or have some experience, you'll explore essential techniques like pinch pots, coil construction, and wheel throwing. Learn how to add texture, decorate, and finish your pieces with glazing. Throughout the week, you'll experiment, problem-solve, and express your unique artistic vision. By the end, you'll have your own handcrafted pottery pieces to take home and cherish. Join us for a creative, patient, and fun journey into the world of ceramics!

Ready to bring your wildest stories and ideas to life on the screen? In this exciting class, you'll dive into the world of coding using fun, colorful blocks that fit together like puzzle pieces. Start by creating your very own cartoon story with Scratch programming, where you can animate characters and build interactive adventures. Then, challenge yourself by designing a cool math game that lets you practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in a fun, engaging way. Finally, unleash your creativity as you build your own video game from scratch! Throughout the course, you'll get to code, collaborate, and share your amazing projects with friends. Get ready for a creative, tech-powered adventure!

We all have stories to tell, whether true or fictional. In this camp, we will play with different forms of writing--poetry, short fiction, and memoir--and find the forms that most speak to our authentic voices. The goal is not the creation of a perfect product, but rather the joy of finding the mediums that best tap into our creative spirits. Come ready to experiment, share with others, give feedback, and most of all, have fun with language!

CSI students will explore the principles of wind and solar energy through interactive engineering challenges. They will build and test small small-scale wind turbines, experimenting with blade designs, gear ratios, and generators to maximize efficiency. Students will also design a passive solar home and create a hybrid energy system that integrates wind and solar power to reduce environmental impact. By applying real-world engineering concepts, they will gain a deeper understanding of how smart design can increase energy efficiency and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Students will explore guitar, bass guitar, drums, piano, and voice both individually as well as in a rock band setting playing a variety of popular music styles. Iconic and standard notation, composing and improvising, and songwriting will all be introduced. No previous experience is required!

CSI’s Leadership and Design Thinking class draws upon the curriculum from Cate School’s leadership program and the teachings of Stanford University’s d.school. Through the model of service-leadership, students explore their own values and styles of being a leader, all while developing greater empathy for others. Through the creation of greater group and self awareness, students engage in leadership as a deliberate practice. With these tools, students also start to explore the world of design thinking, a process which draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world to solve challenges and problems in an empathetic and creative way.

In this week of wellness we will explore a variety of practices that will help to ground and relax you. By learning about the brain and the science behind mindfulness, you will learn how to create space between your reactions and your responses when you become stressed. We will focus on self-care and ways to regulate the nervous system through gentle stretching, yoga, mindful meditation, time in nature, and journaling. These practices will help enhance your brain fitness and overall well-being. Wear comfy clothes so you can move freely.

Students will participate in a creative writing workshop with a special focus on the visual arts. Rather than using written prompts, we will generate content from selected imagery, designed to evoke students to tap into their visual imagination. Each day of the workshop will focus on one particular aspect of the writing process- brainstorming, setting, plot structure, crafting dialogue, and revision- as students will hone and polish their short story over the course of the week, working from the germ of an idea to a finished piece.

Learn what all those knobs do! This class is an introduction to recording in a professional studio. Students will learn how to record with industry standard recording equipment such as: SSL in-line analog console, Pro Tools, outboard gear, cue mixing system, TT patch bay, and more. Topics that will be covered include: microphone techniques, mixing tips, signal flow, and processing. Students will set up, record, and mix both vocals and instruments.  Throughout this class, you will gain insight and experience into how hit records are made! This is a technical class but open to beginners excited to dive in! You do not need to be a musician, but you must love creating music!

Experiment with new painting techniques and materials, discover new ways of building an image, and most importantly: play! Students will use acrylic paint, paper, projectors, a laser cutter, and their imaginations to create original mixed media paintings. We will look at artists who use collage, quilting, and stenciling to create still lifes, portraits, and narrative works of art. Students will exit the course with at least one complete work of art.

Come explore the world of printmaking. In this course, students will learn the basics of traditional carving, etching and stencil making. The class will then start to play and explore with a range of non traditional materials and techniques for image transfers. All the while asking: will it print?