By Kathy Henry Dowell

You've seen the travel ads. Tour eight countries in 11 days! Cruise the Caribbean and see six islands! Visit as many USC camps as you can in one summer!

Well, you probably haven't seen that last one. But I have, and I signed up immediately. That is how I came to spend last summer as a grown-up camper. Art, fashion, physics, robotics, sports—Carolina offers some 60 camps and activities, and I sampled several.

At Fashion Camp, offered by the College of Hospitality, Retail, and Sport Management, 19 yawning middle-school girls come alive when class begins at 9 a.m.

“So many things are made from textiles: carpet, backpacks, even dog leashes,” says retailing graduate student Alita Neal, passing out fabric samples. “If you're going to work in the apparel industry, you need to know the difference between cotton and silk.”

After learning the properties of fabrics, each camper puts together a textile swatch kit. The girls giggle and shyly admit they stayed up late the night before. They were designing clothes, preparing a stage for the end-of-camp fashion show, and snapping each other's photos with disposable cameras. Their bleary-eyed camp leaders, graduate students in retailing who stayed up with them, nod wearily.

At Robotics Camp, offered by the Carolina Master Scholars Adventure Series, an electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate leads daily discussions. “What is a sensor?” Santiago Lentijo asks a roomful of middle-school students. “A sensor converts a quantity that you want to measure into a usable signal, usually electronic,” a boy quickly answers. Talk continues about rotation sensors, face detecting and tracking, and encoders. A girl in the back row relates it to the L.E.D. presentation from the day before.

“Campers complete two major robotics projects,” Lentijo says. “Today, we start making a Weasel robot with a line tracking sensor and a wall-hugging sensor.”

Lentijo tries to quietly unpack robotics kits. It doesn't work. The campers bolt from their chairs and cluster around him, each reaching for a kit.

At the School of Music's Band Camp, a day starts on the Horseshoe with 100 high school musicians maintaining perfect lines and perfect steps. Add dew-kissed grass, a blue sky, and music, and you've got a real treat for the senses.

At the Department of Art's Young Artists Workshop, elementary school students are given a project.

“Draw something that symbolizes you: your feelings, something you like, a place you like to be,” said Minuette Floyd, an art professor and director of the workshop, which has been offered in the fall and spring for years. Concentrating on the paper in front of them, the campers grip their crayons and begin to draw.

At Science Camp, another Carolina Master Scholars camp, students stare at a sheet of plywood that has hundreds of nails protruding upward.

“It's a classic demonstration of force versus area: the Bed of Nails allows the weight of a person to be distributed over a large area,” says physics professor David Tedeschi. Campers take turns gingerly sitting on the nails, amazed that there is no blood loss. They cheer when Tedeschi brings in the rotational platform.

“A person just standing on the platform will spin on a frictionless rotating surface,” he explains. “However, if the occupant holds a bicycle wheel with its axis of spin parallel to a radius of the disk and then tries to raise or lower the bicycle wheel, it will cause the platform to slow its spin.” Each student tries the platform and grins as they discover how it works.

At the end of any enjoyable trip comes the realization that to see and do everything you'll have to make the trip again. So, this summer I'll begin with football camp, work my way to dance camp, and finally get to the Carolina Journalism Institute. I hear that being a journalist is a lot of fun.