Blinded with science
Camp Invention, the weeklong exercise at Houston Middle School, glowed with problemsolving in various scientific activities.
From it, all manner of obstacles were introduced, their solutions sketched out in morning journal time by children engineering solutions to get CrickoBot, for instance, up on the zip line that will carry him over a water feature in a theme park, or once there, away from the spiderbot lurking menacingly on the line.
“To get to the top of the zip line, they had to create some kind of ladder or pulley to get the cricket up there,” said Missy Abel, instructional curriculum coordinator in Germantown Municipal School District.
The district hosted its first Camp Invention, a weeklong discovery in the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) for elementary students, this year at Houston Middle — and the less-than-subtle realization was that it likely has a long future in the district.
“We’ll definitely be doing this again next year,” said Christa Phillips, lead STEM teacher at Houston High, who oversaw the inaugural year with a clipboard and her father, Mr. Steve to the children and Steven Ibosh to everyone else.
Ibosh, an engineer at Johnson Controls, took a week of vacation to tend to the technicalities of kids and technology, stepping in with a screwdriver or a wire clipper to solve material challenges.
By Friday, he was knee-deep in his own childhood.
“They’re getting to do what I got in trouble for when I was their age,” he said with a chuckle over family appliances that succumbed to his curiosity, including the radio and iron.
“I’ve noticed there are two types of approaches,” he said. “There are the kids who come in quietly and think, ‘What can I do to solve this problem?’ Then, for lack of a better term, there’s the bull in the china shop. They grab the biggest pair of pliers and start tearing stuff apart.”
The truth is, he said, “You need both. You need someone who will take the big chances, and someone who can analyze the situation.”
Camp Invention is itself the invention of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which 26 years ago was trying to create buzz for the museum, said Judi Colloredo, program development manager for six Southern states, including Tennessee.
“So we went to schools to present information about inventors,” she said.
This summer, 15,000 schools, museums and nonprofits will offer at least one week of the camp, including Bon Lin Elementary in Bartlett. Its camp starts Monday.
“We are the only hall of fame that pays it forward,” Colloredo said. “Basically, we are looking for the next inventor.”
The hall of fame, backed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Collegiate Inventors Competition, creates a new curriculum each year and ships all the supplies to the camp base.
About 80 children, kindergarten through fifth-grade, signed up in Germantown. Besides the $270 fee, the price of admission included a discarded electronic or appliance to take apart, plus an armload of recyclables — plastic K cups, discarded bits of wire and plastic bags — to stock the Inventor Supply Room.
The campers go to work each day, starting at 8 a.m., completing four daily modules with a series of built-in design conundrums, and racing back and forth to the supply room for parts.
In the dimly-lit lab, knots of children, some in costumers made of Bubble Wrap, were finishing projects on the physics of lights for the soon-to-begin “light party,” a celebration of the motorized disco ball and orbs they made with balloons and LED bulbs.
At the first table, children were puzzling over a light baton, a tall cylinder in the middle of the table that lit in a bright color when they spoke or laughed or dropped something on the floor.
“It works with sound waves,” said Genevieve Remsen, 8. “If you laugh, ha-ha, it lights.”
The next challenge was to determine what made the colors change (length of the sound waves) and use that knowledge to create a parlor game.
Across the room, Zoe Van Drimmelen, 7, showed her now-normal-looking ankle, an improvement from the slight swelling after a spill at camp on Thursday.
“I made sure my mom knew I didn’t want her to come get me. What we had left was my favorite part,” she said.
“When I heard about this camp, I said, ‘Doing it,’ ” Zoe said, with a single, firm clap of her hands.
“I was born to do this kind of stuff.”