Spend 4 days at camp designing, engineering, creating and testing an amazing 4th of July parade float! And on 4th of July, our staff will be available to help make sure you have a great experience taking your parade float to a 4th of July parade.
Greenmeadow Community Center, our home base for camp, has an annual 4th of July parade through the Greenmeadow neighborhood in Palo Alto complete with marching band and parade floats. You will spend Monday-Thursday creating your parade float with us and then bring your grownups with you to Greenmeadow on 4th of July to guide your float through the parade.
Our parade float designers will:
Brainstorm - Consider a variety of possibilities for their parade floats
Previsualize - Use old school pencil, paper and ruler and high-tech 3D cad software to create a design for your float.
Reduce, Reuse, and Repurpose - To be as “Green” as possible, we plan to upcycle discarded materials for our parade floats
Create - Creating a parade float is the combination of combining imagination with the practical realities of physics and engineering. We will help you to make a creative float that can both be visually stunning and survive the realities of the road.
Incorporate Electronics, Mechatronics, Hydraulics and/or Animatronics - Our team of tech savvy camp staffers will help you incorporate some mechanical, hydraulic and animatronic wizardry to give your parade float some magic and motion.
Test - The parade route is 0.7 miles….long enough to cause a parade float to fail if it isn’t up to the job. Put your float through a variety of tests to make sure it has a good chance of not just surviving but thriving on parade day. Failure is part of the process and though your float could fail in small or large ways, we will work with you to minimize the chance of that.
Parade Your Stuff - By Friday, your float should be ready to share with the Greenmeadow community. Our staff will be on hand for last minute touch-ups, safety checks, tech support and parade route pit crew duties should you need assistance with your float.
We are excited to use what we know about leading young people through the design-build-test-iterate process to create some exciting and fun parade floats for Greenmeadow’s 4th of July!
