Hi! I’m Francie Black the Co-Founder and lead instructor of Homeschool STEM Kids, formerly Home Hacker Camp.  My  husband, son (who was in middle school at the time) and I started Home Hacker Camp many years ago in the basement of our home because there were few STEM classes available to students in our area.  My background was tech (see my bio below), my husband is truly a home hacker (building cell phones and other gadgets in our basement) and my son was into engineering and tech but there were limited options available for deep education on the subject.  

The local paper heard about some of what we were doing and wrote an article about it.  In the article we said that if others were interested we would make some of our projects available to other students.  We got responses, and we’ve been doing summer tech camps, teaching courses at schools, co-ops and online ever since.  

Making the cellphones and some of the other devices was too expensive (and time consuming) so we gravitated to functional robots which everyone enjoys.  

We have a very specific teaching style that is not easily replicated.  This is key to our class structure and have found it to be effective.

As for my son, he is now a Starship Engineer at SpaceX, working on the Starship rocket that is being designed to take cargo and humans to Mars.  He will periodically provide a “Gateway to Mars” talk to our students.  Someday, I am hoping to provide a homeschool field trip to the facility.

Technology is not going away and we feel it is a critical component of any eduction.  We have a passion for teaching homeschool students so that they can get a solid foundation in STEM skills.  We firmly believe that those who “Learn STEM today.  Lead the Future.”