Greenwood’s Camp Invention stresses critical thinking skills
Future careers focusing on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are ones that are being actively encouraged among the upcoming generation of kids, as those careers will be needed in the coming years. In Greenwood, children got some hands-on experience this past week to introduce them to STEM-related fields through Camp Invention.
The program of Camp Invention was held from July 11-15 at the Greenwood Elementary School. The third year of the program -- with a one-year hiatus due to COVID -- the program’s goal is to teach students about the STEM areas while encouraging them to develop their own critical thinking skills and ways to problem solve.
Michelle Green, the district LMC specialist and assessment coordinator, directed the week-long program. Each year since it was first offered in Greenwood in the summer of 2019, she said the Camp Invention program has offered something different for the students. In this way, she said the students are able to come back year to year and learn something new despite being in the program before.
“Every year there is a new program,” she said. “They never teach the kids the same thing twice. The kids are not repeating the lessons they learned before so it keeps them engaged from year to year.”
This year, Green said Camp Invention’s program was called Explore, with four different areas of classes. Each of these classes, she said, taught students something different, whether it was about robots in their Robot Aquatics class, copyright and trademarks in The Attic, space exploration in Spacecation or inclined planes, angles and basic physics in Marble Arcade.
“There are four modules that they can explore,” she said. “Spacecation, they are working on missions, special missions throughout the week to learn about space. For example, they are traveling out to the asteroid belt to do asteroid mining. They need to put materials together to build space packs and adding tools to complete missions. In Robotic Aquatics they learn about life in the ocean and the animals that live there. In The Attic, they work on learning about copyright, trademark and licensing properties. In Marble Arcade they are working with simple machines and designing them, learning about inclined planes and angles and how those play a role in a marble’s speed.”
In total, Green said there were 64 kids in grades 1-6 that participated in Camp Invention this year. Since Camp Invention’s program provides them with all of the materials they will need for the students, she said tailoring the lessons to suit the students’ various ages and learning levels was not a challenge. This task was further helped by the camp’s instructors who are both teachers at the Greenwood Elementary School and returning instructors of the program.
“Camp Invention sent us a full curriculum to us to use,” she said. “It gives the students thought questions for intermediate groups and simpler things for the younger age groups so everything can be tailored to a student’s age. And since we are all teachers and have done this before we know how to properly apply those lessons to the kids.”
Those lessons the kids learn, Green said, go a long way in not only teaching them about how the world works around them but also how to think and apply their lessons on their own. Critical thinking and problem solving are important skills for any student to have, and during the week the kids were able to use the materials given to find their own ways to answer the questions posed by the classes they were in.
“It pushes them to think outside the box and come up with their own solutions to a problem,” she said. “If they learn something in one class and then they go to another, they may not know how to solve a problem from the other class, but they will know the process of how to problem solve and come up with a solution that will work in a different situation. We don’t do, the students do.”
CHEYENNE THOMAS/STAFF PHOTOS
