The value of icamp

Why does icamp cost so much? It’s a fair question. There are lots of other camps where you can send your kid for less than the cost of icamp. As you’re seeing prices for laptops drop to unheard-of prices, you might be wondering exactly whose lavish lifestyle your icamp fee is supporting. The answer might surprise you.

Children’s Technology Workshop was founded on the idea of making high-tech creativity tools accessible to children and tweens. The most difficult part of this idea is the word “accessible.” Technology is complicated – this is probably not news to you. Programming, Computer-Aided Design (CAD), video game development, and animation are normally the domain of well-paid professionals using expensive, specialized tools. Making this domain accessible to a 9-year old is a real accomplishment with two key components: great staff and great curriculum.

We regularly receive stellar feedback about the quality of our staff, and this is no accident. First, we look for staff with education, child care, or other background that ensures an understanding of kids. Second, we look for technical understanding. Third, we ensure that everyone is thoroughly trained. Finally, we hire enough people to enable staff to pay individual and small-group attention to campers throughout the day. For every 7 campers, there is at least 1 fully trained, adult (18+) counselor available in addition to interns, junior staff, and Counselors-In-Training. Our expenses reflect this focus on high-quality staffing: for each dollar you pay for icamp, a full 51 cents goes to pay salaries.

The next most important part in achieving our goal of “accessibility” is a high-quality curriculum. Since its inception, the company has invested in developing its own curriculum at a rate of about 12% of revenue. Our curriculum consists of a huge collection of original project plans, tutorials, instruction sheets, and other resources, accessed by campers and staff through the Interactive Curriculum Organizer (ICOR). Simple on the surface, ICOR organizes projects by difficulty level, technologies involved, and themes they can be used in. The result is a 100% rate of project success: every camper completes their final projects in a week of camp, whether or not they have done similar projects before.

About 7% goes into getting the word out, and 6% into operational support, overhead, and taxes. Another 11% is divided among consumable materials, space rentals, and replacing those chewed-up, stepped-on, and abandoned LEGO pieces.

The remaining 13% are the money available for profit and investment needed to expand and serve new communities. This money supports the purchase and periodic replacement of laptops to ensure that every camper has their own computer, and enough webcams, game controllers, and LEGO motors to build the coolest project they can build.

We believe it’s worth every penny.