Education coordinator leads her first redesigned summer camps at Mote

“When I first visited Mote, I remember telling my mom ‘I want to work here.’ I was like 10 years old and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is amazing.' I fell in love with it,” said Madison Royer. 

Royer started in January of this year as the new education program coordinator at Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium. Since then she's redesigned the summer camp programs at Mote and recently led her staff through a successful first summer full of education and fun.

Originally from Ohio, Royer moved to Manatee County for a job as a teacher right after college. She had wanted to return to the area since her college internship at Mote. She taught for five years in a range of different grades, including third grade, fourth grade, and marine science for high schoolers.

During the summer, her main focus is the Mote summer camps. These ran as one-week camps starting June 5 and ending on Aug. 4. She said that Mote’s education department encouraged her to make the programs her own. 

“I redesigned our themes and our curriculum, and made it a little bit more of an educational experience,” said Royer. “I wanted them to walk away with knowledge that they can take. I've had really great feedback from parents who say, ‘They are coming home and they are teaching me about things that I don't even know about.’ My main goal was just to add a little bit more relevant education to the camps. Previous Mote camps were amazing. I just came with a different mindset.” 

Photo by Petra Rivera

The summer camps at Mote are divided into three age groups: Tidal Tykes are 5-7 years old, Aqua Kids are 8-10 years old and Sea Sleuths are 11-13 years old. 

Each week has a different theme. This includes "Habitat Hoppers," focusing on different underwater habitats, "Alien Invasion," which ties a connection between sea and space exploration and "Salty Super Heroes," which teaches about different people who have impacted the world of marine science. 

Photo by Petra Rivera

“It's really a lot of critical thinking,” said Royer. “These changes are just making sure there's a purpose to everything in camp and you're not just doing an activity to do it, but you're doing it because it goes with your overall theme of the day.”

The Mote summer camps have flexible schedules offering a choice between a morning or afternoon camp and registering for another week or two of camp. Mote also offers day and virtual camps. 

Royer designed each of the camps around engaging the different age groups. The typical camp week started on Monday with an overview of the grounds and a behind-the-scenes tour of Mote and dry activities in the classroom establishing the theme for the week. Tuesday, the action started with water activities such as snorkeling, dip netting and kayaking. Water activities continued throughout the week, finishing on Friday with a project tying up everything the campers learned.

“The goal was to give them a fun experience,” said Royer. “But that they are also walking away with that knowledge from that camp and able to apply it to their lives and hopefully help create our future generation of ocean conservation specialists.”

The summer camp staff is made up of the volunteers, interns and the full-time education employees. At the beginning of May, the staff went through a two-week training that encouraged team bonding and taught them about what the summer would entail. 

“It's been amazing, because everybody clicked really quick,” said Royer. “We had a great first two weeks together, just training. And during that time, I tried to keep it nice and fun. I did all the activities with them that we do with the kids. We played different games, because I wanted them to experience camp a little bit, too, from the camper’s side of things.”

Photo by Petra Rivera

Royer would like to implement more day camps throughout the year to provide an opportunity for children to keep learning on teacher work days.

“Our education department is actually great, because they've already brought a lot of initiatives in to reach into underserved and underrepresented communities,” said Royer. “Once the new aquarium opens, we're going to be so much more accessible to all of those communities. I'm excited to be a part of it because I really want to bring my knowledge of Title One schools to our education department.”

Royer has already started dreaming about how to make next summer better for the campers, especially reflecting on how well everything went this year. A goal of hers is to make a summer camp focusing on high school students after seeing how much her high school volunteers loved spending summer at Mote. 

Photo by Petra Rivera

“It's just neat seeing everything come together and come to life because I wasn't sure how it would all go,” said Royer. “I have never done this before. But we've had a lot of smiling faces, people falling asleep on the way home. We have a lot of parents saying how their kids are so tired but they loved it. Their excitement is really what drives us all.”