School of Fun for Children in Fukushima

Please find a Japanese version of this report here.

December 2017 for Academy Camp started with a charity concert in London. Thank you very much indeed once again for those who made efforts for realization of the concert, the performing artist, and those who have donated to us through GlobalGiving. Thank you for those wonderful gifts.

We have sent out our gifts to some of participants of this summer camp - somehow it took us so long to produce 3D figures of them from the data they 3D-scanned by themselves in FabCafe Tokyo in August. The long delay was due to a procedure to enable us to use 3D printers at Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC), Keio University, where we are holding our recent camps, and mismatch of data format. But finally, we managed to actually print the figures, and it looked like a reunion of the camp (see the photo below).

Now, we are heading for our first camp in 2018 to be held in February, again at SFC. We have named the camp "Academy Camp You Decide". We do not make decisions on the camp activities. The participants will do. Because, in the age of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in which children today will live when they grow up, we believe that making decisions on what to do is the most important human skill of which should not be deprived by automation. Already, we have been receiving many ideas of what to do in the camp from the prospective participants: make robots, make new sports, make a big Rube Goldberg machine together, reproduce the world of Star Wars, and so on. Will it be possible to realize all of them in a three-day camp? We will see. We are looking forward to working with those children.

Thanks to all your support, we have barely achieved our funding goal for the winter camp. But we need more for subsequent camps, so please help us. We are all in this together to bring the future the children want nearer.

Links:

• Academy Camp Facebook page in English
• Our new overview web page in English