The City of Fishers Parks Department has added some new summer camps for various ages this year, and Fishers residents also will be able to register for a variety of summer activities offered through the new Fishers Arts Center.
Parks Director Marissa Deckert said they have expanded the popular Robotics Camp from two weeks to eight weeks and created a full-day option in addition to the half-day camp offered previously.
“The cool thing about that is we partner with Fishers High School,” she said. “There’s a Tiger Dynasty Robotics Team — they’ve won a bunch of national and regional awards. We partner with them and the instructor of that club and hire a lot of those high school students to help run that camp and help us develop that curriculum.”
For kids interested in the arts, the department has some camps that focus on fiber art, repurposing and cosplay.
The first, a fashion runway camp, teaches participants ages 10 to 16 the basics of designing and sewing clothing.
“Hand sewing, machine sewing, draping and design are all things that they’ll learn in this camp,” Deckert said. “And at the end of that week in summer, they actually put on a fashion show for their parents.”
A fashion decor camp focuses on reusing and repurposing items that otherwise would be thrown away.
“They bring items from home that they think are kind of at the end of their life and they reimagine those things,” Deckert said. “So, a plant stand that somebody’s not using anymore. What can that be? An old piece of clothing, a frame — and then they use all sorts of mixed media to create new things from old items.”
A new anime and cosplay camp will take participants through designing their own anime character, developing a story for that character and finally creating a costume with materials from home.
“Then the last day, they cosplay with their design, and they get a photograph of their awesome new character that they’ve created,” Deckert said.
A junior lifeguard camp at Geist Waterfront Park also is new and will not only teach basic lifeguard skills to kids ages 11-15, but it will also train some potential new lifeguards for the Parks Department to hire after they turn 16.
“They will be attending camp while the park is actually open to the public, so there will be a little bit of guarding,” Deckert said. “There’ll be 1-on-1 instruction with a lifeguard out there.”
The Parks Department’s summer camp offerings are open for registration at playfishers.com/167/Summer-Camp.
In addition to the Parks Department camps, Indy Arts Center — formerly known as the Indianapolis Arts Center — will host numerous summer arts camp classes at the new Fishers Arts Center, 1 Municipal Drive, which is under construction but due to open this spring. For information about those camps, visit indyartcenter.org/camps.
