iD Tech Camps

My son (and my friends son and daughter) attended the camp in Chapel Hill last June. They LOVED it. My son is 9 and very into Minecraft, so we did the mine craft camp. He learned a lot of cool things and was so excited to go back, he has not stopped talking about it, and he wants to do the sleepover camp next year, which we will probably do. The counselors were enthusiastic and I enjoyed reading their CV’s, seeing where you can go with this. Highly recommended!

To any parents that may be considering sending their kids to ID Tech technology camp, I would not recommend it. My son went there in June and though the counselors are polite and upbeat college students, we were less than satisfied with the overall quality of the experience.
The Pros:
— I did find the camp counselors energetic, upbeat, polite, and socially engaging with the kids. I do think that they do a good job of trying to make the experience a fun one and facilitate getting the kids comfortable with one another.
— The UNC campus is a nice venue for the camp.
The Cons:
— The first part of the disappointment relates to the fact that even though we had signed my son up for a particular track (FPS — Unreal Development Kit), on the first day, they had him attending another track. My son, who is 12, brought it to their attention, but was told that he was in the right class and he must not have remembered what we had signed him up for. My wife talked to the camp director immediately after hearing that from my son the first night. After the camp director checked into it at my wife’s request, it turns out that there were two kids (one being my son) with the same first name and last Initial. Since check-​in is done by finding your name tag that displays only first name and last initial, the problem occurred there, so they actually had two campers attending the wrong tracks for the first day. It makes me wonder about those kids that have medications distributed while they are there? Do they ever get the wrong medicines?
— The instruction format is not what we expected. We thought that it would be instructor lead tutorials, with hands-​on exercises and mentoring as follow-​up to those. As my wife and I asked more and more questions of my son in regards to the structure of the day, it sounds like it was largely self-​paced discovery and you could ask the instructor /​counselor any question you might have. I was very disturbed at the «Class Graduation» when the counselor said to my son, that «he heard that my son was doing some real cool stuff with his level, but he never got the opportunity to play through it». The counselors are good people and I do not intend to paint a picture otherwise. They are also young college students that are not trained instructors and are not necessarily expert at the topic they are teaching.
Considering the cost of the camp, the program that my son attended did not provide anything close to a good value. For any parent considering sending the kids to this camp with the hopes that it will further their technological knowledge of game development and the software tools associated with it, you will be far better off buying a good PC, downloading the tools for free (


etc.) and going to YouTube to watch the ample tutorials there. Once my son is old enough (needs to be a rising ninth grader) we will be sending him to the game development camps at Wake Tech at ~ ¹⁄₃^rd the cost.