Debate, Diplomacy, and Design: Critical Thinking and Collaboration in Overlake’s Summer Camps

With August here and the end of summer approaching, the start of school is coming up too. This week featured a collection of camps that will ease that transition into the fall, emphasizing important skills such as public speaking, critical thinking, and research.

In our Debate camp, campers enhanced their communication skills by crafting arguments about whether the United States is the best country, if schools should allow junk food, and if parents should set strict limits on screen time. In Diplomacy or Domination, our young diplomats had to fight off the terrifying zombie apocalypse. Campers were assigned specific countries, where they researched how the epidemic might impact them and articulated ways they could support containment and relief efforts across the globe. The negotiations went down to the wire, and our young ambassadors got a flavor for what life in politics might look like in the future! The young software engineers in the Coding camp learned graphic design techniques by creating their own characters and also programed their own games. Overall, it was a great week for our students to sharpen their critical thinking skills with a range of dynamic projects.