School’s out for the summer, but the learning didn’t stop at Clear Lake Elementary last week as kids participated in Camp Invention.
Created by the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation, the Camp Invention program is a nationally acclaimed summer enrichment experience for children entering grades one through six.
Participants get a week-long dose of science, math, history and the arts as they work together to discover new things about the world and themselves.
?(They learn) to appreciate qualities in one another that aren’t necessarily valued in the regular public school setting, like inventive thinking,? said Julie Adema, a third-grade teacher at Clear Lake who oversees the program locally. ‘Out-of-the-box thinking, I think, is what’s going to save our world from all of the challenges that we’re facing today.?
Everyday, the kids participated in five different modules (or classes), each with its own unique theme.
They began their days learning about the Vikings, how they traveled the ocean and survived harsh environments.
Along the way, the kids learned how to use a compass, crack codes and read the runic alphabet used by the Scandinavian seafaring warriors.
Creating comic book characters with science-based superpowers, learning about simple machines and physics principles, building a land sled to navigate through a wacky obstacle course and playing classic playground games using nontraditional equipment were also part of the daily fun.
But it was during the ‘I Can Invent? module that the students really let their imaginations soar as they took apart old, discarded mechanical devices or appliances and used the pieces to create inventions.
The younger kids came up with ideas for inventions that solved problems that bug them, while the older kids created Rube Goldberg machines that used four steps to break open an egg.
A Rube Goldberg machine is a deliberately over-engineered apparatus that performs a very simple task in a very complex and convoluted manner, usually through a chain reaction. Think of the classic board game Mouse Trap.
Such machines are named after the American cartoonist, engineer and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883-1970), best known for his series of popular cartoons depicting absurdly-connected devices.
The inventing portion of the camp teaches youngsters to stick with it and try something new if their original idea doesn’t work out. ‘They learn there’s not only one right way