On 18 July 2025 Sheen Academy ran its first winter school-holiday camp. The first slide of the first session was a safety checklist, and that tells you most of what the camp was about.

Real tools, on purpose

Plenty of holiday programmes give children a simulated version of the activity: the app version, the pretend version, the version with nothing that can go wrong. We took the opposite decision. On the desks were gloves, soldering irons and components — actual equipment, used properly, with the rules explained first.

The reason is not bravado. A child who has soldered a joint understands a circuit in a way that no diagram delivers. The competence is real because the task was real, and the confidence that follows is the durable kind. Teaching the safety brief first is part of that: being trusted with something that requires care is itself a large part of the appeal.

Why holidays are the right format

A weekly class is an hour. School holidays give consecutive days, and consecutive days let a learner do something a single hour never allows: carry an unfinished problem overnight, come back and fix it.

That is the actual shape of engineering work, and it is almost impossible to teach in a timetable slot. In a camp, the child who leaves on Tuesday with a project that is not working and arrives on Wednesday knowing what to try has learned the most valuable thing on offer that week.

Mixed ages, mixed rooms

The camps run across a wide age range, and we mix them more than people expect. Older learners explaining something to younger ones is not a compromise — the explanation is where the older learner's understanding gets tested. It also means a room where being ahead is useful rather than competitive.

What it became

The winter 2025 camp was the first. Holiday programmes have since become a fixed part of the academy calendar, and the format that was tested that July — safety first, real tools, multi-day projects, mixed ages — is still the format we run.

They have also become the way many families first meet us. A week-long camp is a much lower commitment than a term of weekly classes, and a good number of our regular learners started by spending one school holiday finding out whether they liked it.

School-holiday camps run in every long break. Check the upcoming workshop dates and available seats.