Camp Invention
pamelamyers | June 30, 2018
We signed up Sam for Camp Invention this year, a STEM camp that just arrived in our school district last year. It is a national program, but just sort of showed up in our district last year. It seemed like something she would love last year too, but we had already signed her up for two weeks of camp. This year, we jumped right on it. There is a lot of robotics and things she already loves involved, so we knew she would love it. I wasn’t there, obviously, but the “camp mom” who is the mom of a kid who was in Sam’s kindergarten class, posted a ton of photos.
Here is Sam’s group! We found out not long before camp started that one of her BFFs, Alaina, was going to camp too. The girls were thrilled to death to be in group together all week!
This was the whole Camp. There were a lot of kids!
In the Mod My Mini Mansion part of camp, the kids built their own “smart homes” any way they wanted. I loved some of the features Sam had, like a rain barrel, LED lights, and other cool gadgets.
Here is some of Sam’s group, and her favorite counselor, Lizzie.
Creating the best dog park!
Sam won the contest so she got to bring it home! It was a doggie pool, complete with swim noodles!
The kids really learned a lot. They even worked on learning binary code!
They ran around and played games a lot too, made some sort of magnetic slime, catapults, and created a robotic arm.
Some of the campers. 🙂
Sam and Lizzie on the last day of camp.
I think Sam’s favorite activity was robotic pet vet. I knew this would be the best thing about camp for her! The kids took apart robotic dogs and compare their inner mechanics to the anatomy and physiology of a real dog, used spatial reasoning and design engineering to construct what they thought would be the best dog park, explored circuits used to make the dog move, bark and light up, and best of all — customized their own robotic dog to take home!
One of the activities was to build an Optibot, a small self-driving robot that senses changes in light, and can follow a path. They designed tracks for their robots to follow, learned about impact sensors using a small-scale crash test dummy, and made their own line tracing robot to take home. Zach wasn’t too sure he liked it. Looked too much like a little critter for him to munch!
This was the path Sam’s group made for the Optibot to follow. Sam got to bring that home too! She totally scored!
Camp Invention was a big hit. Sam learned a TON and I don’t think she realized that she did. Best kind of camp! If she is interested in going next year, I’m all for it!
