Most camps that offer what you love doing at home... will be introducing that hobby to NT kids who have never done it before. Many camps run all day but only offer the specialty topic for 1/2 to 1 hour, and the rest is pretty much athletics and team building. After that summer we stopped signing her up for anything that offered a well-rounded program of FUN! because it wasn't a match. The next year we realized that even in specialty science camps, any camp without a qualifying test of some sort would not be at the right level.
That. Oh that.
Even DD's pottery camp - which was
exactly like you describe yours - was only half an hour a day of pottery (and they weren't allowed near the wheel). As for for anything techy, I've finally accepted that the closest thing to a functional science camp I could ever find is trying to convince some nice physics grad student to let DS job-shadow him for a week....
Lepa, it sounds like you have found a great balance. Encourage and support him to not give up too easily, but recognize there's lots of reasons the camp may be a poor fit, and none of them are his fault. Keep doing what you're doing: give it a fair try, talk to him about the challenge of transitions and what would make a good match. And then, feel comfortable bailing if reasoned discussion - not knee-jerk panic - says this is a poor match. My very introverted, noise-sensitive DD wanted nothing to do with camps until she was about 7, but now has a long list of things she wants to try. It's lovely to be a SAHM and have the luxury of letting her wait until she's ready.
