A+ Summer Middle School immerses rising 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in an environment that encourages advanced thinking, creative problem solving, and a lifelong love of learning. For six days, students will explore their potential as inventors, detectives, and strategists. Interdisciplinary classes will strengthen students’ talents in reading, writing, math, and science, while pushing them to employ these skills in new and imaginative ways.

Students will participate in a tournament of minds, and as part of that, they will complete brain benders, physical challenges, and trust exercises that will require students to demonstrate critical thinking and teamwork.

Students spend the rest of their day in a major track. A+ Middle School attendees will select one of two tracks: Future Studies or Mystery Summer. (Track offerings vary by location). 

Track 1: Future Studies (Offered at Stanford, MIT, Conneticut College and UCLA)

What will the world look like in 100 years? 1,000 years? Will it be a perfect place with a harmonious society, or will it be a barren landscape, rife with corruption? For forward thinking students ready to build their vision of a new world, the Future Studies track is an opportunity to think creatively and practically about today’s dilemmas and tomorrow’s possibilities.

In this track, students will invent useful objects for the future. They will learn how to think like an inventor, draw up a project proposal, protoype, and market their idea. From homes to chores, participants will update common objects and tasks to make them future-friendly. Moreover, students will learn about significant inventors in history, and they may even have the opportunity to meet with contemporary inventors!

Students will also read notable “authors of the future”, such as HG Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Mary Shelly, while asking the central question, what does a vision of the future have to do with the present? Students will learn advanced principles of effective storytelling, as they build their own out-of-this world settings, round and extraordinary characters, and clear, original narratives.

Track 2: Mystery Summer (Offered at Stanford, UC Berkeley and Georgetown)

Conspiracies! Crime! Murder! Theft! In the Mysteries track, students will become gumshoe readers and first-rate sleuths. They will learn to identify fallacies of reasoning, distinguish between evidence and inference, and detect clues and hints. Students will read mystery masters, such as Edgar Allen Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in addition to more contemporary writers of detective fiction.

Students will also learn the basics of crime scene forensics in a class that employs deductive logic as a way to piece together evidence to identify a culprit. In one week, students will learn about code breaking, fingerprinting, blood examination, and ink and handwriting analysis. Armed with a detective’s most significant tools- the skillful power to pose leading questions, the principles of deductive thinking, and the ability to magnify deceptively insignificant details, students will break codes, take prints, and analyze the evidence in order to solve a final camp-wide mystery.

From the perfect crime to the clue that unravels the entire plot, writing a detective story is one of the best exercises for young writers because it requires thoughtful plot development and meticulous story mapping. With the help of topnotch writing instructors, students will author their own slice of detective fiction for fellow students to solve in a final reading that will have everyone trying to figure out “Who Dunnit?”

A+ Middle School is designed for students who are already excelling in school. While there is no minimum GPA requirement for the program, students who are already achieving a 3.0 GPA (or equivalent) will be best prepared for success in the A+ program.

We recommend that returning A+ Middle campers select a different track if they wish to limit curriculum overlap.

A few words from our A+ Summer Middle School Campers!

"[The staff members] were practically perfect in every way... This was my first sleepover camp and I loved it." — Kenza Farington

"Mysteries was amazing. I loved it! I would do it again next year. The activities are sooo fun." — Hyunji Do

“The staff was excellent. I was surprised by the qualifications of each staff member. They were really friendly and professional.” — Gigi Wilson-Butler, parent

"It is a great experience for all ages to stay at a college and learn about different things and meet cool people!" — participant 

“The staff was exceptional- each and every one...bright, enthusiastic, upbeat and their love of children was obvious” — Joanne Alex