Apple Valley Students Innovate at Camp Invention

Ready, set, learn.

About 95 Apple Valley students are tackling Camp Invention this week at under the guidance of teacher Jodi Hansen, who teaches ninth-grade science in Worthington.

The camp, rooted in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, gives students entering grades one through six an opportunity for a hands-on educational experience.

Students are getting the opportunity to work together in the week-long camp to build mechanical critters and their habitats, create a virtual world and tear apart broken appliances and revamp them into inventions akin to a Rube Goldberg-type machine, which performs a task.

“They just eat it up,” Hansen said of the students.

Started in 1990 as an outreach program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum, Susan Clarke, regional coordinator for Camp Invention in Minnesota, said the nonprofit has grown to 48 states. Last year, 66,000 kids participated in various summer programs.

“It’s learning with a twist,” Clarke said. “Everything is open-ended. There are no right or wrong answers.”

Camp Invention touts four different programs, which rotate annually through participating schools so kids have a chance to try different activities each year.

This year Apple Valley is equipped with the INNOVATE program, which offers five different daily lessons:

• SMart: Science, Math & Art, which lets students see the artistic aspects of math and science through things like fractals, angles and topology.

• Power’d, which challenges students to look at alternative energy sources to power robotic critters they construct, and has them create circuits from motors and batteries.

• Hatched, in which students create a virtual world and learn economics concepts to make that world function.

• Game On: Power Play, which challenges children to use nontraditional equipment to play classic games.

• I Can Invent: Edison’s Workshop, which challenges students to tear apart a broken appliance and re-imagine it into a multi-step machine that solves a challenge.

The I Can Invent workshop is the signature unit of Camp Invention and anchors all four programs.

“[The students] would be perfectly happy to do that all week long,” Clarke laughed. “They love investigating how things work.”

Hansen and many of the counselors teach at multiple Camp Invention camps in Minnesota throughout the summer; one thing the kids take from camp is learning how to persist—realizing that their inventions might not work the first time, or even after many tries, but that they should keep working at it, Hansen said.

Seeing the students grow is what keeps Hansen coming back each year.

“It makes them become problem-solvers,” she said.