Programs

We're busy fleshing out the details of presenting Magic and the Mind to different audiences, including children and adults. As these exciting programs become available, we will list them here and announce them on our Facebook page and Twitter feed. In the mean time, if you would like us to present a program at your school or event, call or drop us a line and we'll be happy to speak with you about that.

Youth Camp

Our pilot program—a youth camp—will take place Aug. 11–15, 2014, 1–5 p.m., at UCSD Extension, City Center, Room 303. This five-day program, designed for 12- to 18-year-olds, combines magic, neuroscience, and psychology to explore how the human brain is so easily fooled. Learning real-world information like this provides students with valuable insight and critical-thinking skills that will help them to understand one very important concept: Things aren't always as they appear.

Class exercises center on perception, attention, memory, assumptions, reasoning, and social cognition. Students will study and perform magic tricks that exploit certain weaknesses in these cognitive functions and discuss how the functions play a role in deceiving the mind. There will be a final group project in which participants create a new or adapted magical illusion, and the instructors will conduct short pretests and posttests to measure the program's impact on students' critical-thinking skills.

The fee for this five-day program is $295 per student, with a 20-student maximum. To register, please go to the following UCSD Extension web page and enter Section ID 105060: http://extension.ucsd.edu/cart/index.cfm?vAction=view. Registering for the program will require the creation of an online account. When checking out, be sure to click on the tiny black arrow next to the “Not For Credit” drop-down box and select “Not for Credit” from below the dotted line (do this even if you see “Not For Credit” already selected by default). Then check off both checkboxes before clicking the “Checkout” button.

Since UCSD Extension was kind enough to squeeze in our program for this summer, there could be technical issues unique to registering for this particular class. If that happens, you can register by calling UCSD Extension at 858-534-3400. If you have any other questions or concerns, please contact us at info@magicandthemind.org and we'll do all we can to help.

In the mean time, please download the Magic and the Mind school flier and sample schedule (PDF) by clicking on either the previous links or the images below. For the latest updates, please browse the News section of this site or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.