Sisters Kimmie and Jessie Gordon chatted and laughed while using their fingers to spread a gooey paste over a plaster mold of Kimmie's face.

“It won't stick,” Kimmie, 12, said.

“To anything it's supposed to, anyway,” added Jessie, 15.

The sisters, middle and high school students, were creating a mask inspired by Maleficent — the lead character in a 2014 Disney movie — in a special effects makeup class at Howard Community College.

For the past 30 years, through its Kids on Campus program, the college has offered summer courses to elementary, middle and high school students in a wide variety of subjects, including engineering, Italian language and fashion.

“We've always been very innovative, very unique,” said director Sara Baum, who is retiring from the program after this summer. “We always have tried to provide things that aren't the usual.”

Baum has overseen the program since its beginning in 1986, when course offerings could easily be listed on a single sheet of paper — folded in half.

Now the college offers more than 250 classes and enrolls 3,000 youngsters. Each course costs between $155 and $335, depending on duration and the supplies required, and lasts one to two weeks.

“We create from this environment of higher education something like a high school during the summer,” Baum said, “on all three floors.”

In a classroom down the hall from the special effects makeup class, middle school kids were making pillows, pencil cases and armor out of duct tape in duct tape art class. A floor up, a foreign language teacher asked her students how to say hello in Japanese. Outside, students in the “Who Done It?” class wiggled through an obstacle course made from yarn and folding chairs.

Kids on Campus also offers academic courses such as SAT preparation and algebra review, but Baum said a lot of parents prefer to enroll their students in art classes during the summer, “because so much of that, because of time constraints, has been removed from school,” she said.

Jonah Richardson, a seventh-grader from Clarksville Middle School, chose the duct tape art class for exactly that reason.

“I don't get a lot of art in during my normal year,” he said while donning a suit of armor made from the tape. “So I thought I would shake it up and do something interesting.”

Teachers at Kids on Campus, many of whom work in Howard County public schools during the school year, are recruited to teach a particular subject or develop their own courses.

“Many times if somebody has a new or different idea, they will come in and pitch it to us,” said program administrator Elizabeth Watson. “And once we have a relationship with teachers, we work with them and we'll talk about, have you ever thought about trying this? Or they'll come to us and say, I have a great idea for next year, we should do this. So that keeps it exciting and fresh.”

One teacher was initially recruited to teach a college assessment preparation class this summer, Watson said, but ended up planning a “jedi” training class as well.

The teacher was “hoping to do something more exciting, different,” Watson said. “It's the summertime, so you want to balance that seriousness out with something just purely fun and enjoyable.”

Watson said that her staff tries to turn over a third of the courses each summer

“So it's a good number of new things to try every year, because we want people to be able to come back year after year,” she said.

The Gordon sisters have attended Kids on Campus for the past five summers, they said, and have taken everything from “Vets and Pets” and “Passion for Fashion” to “Fun with Frosting.”

“We got to make a bunch of different kinds of frosting and we got to work with fondant,” Kimmie said.

“More importantly, we got to eat it,” said Jessie.

“And it was really yummy,” Kimmie said. “You go through like 64 pounds of sugar by Wednesday.”

lphilip@baltsun.com