Camp Invention is offering fun activities focused on STEM
The annual Camp Invention program made a return to Plant City on Monday, at the Arthur Boring Civic Center.
The event focuses on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, and takes it a step further by offering more hands-on activities than what may be offered in a classroom.
Its theme this year is ‘Explore.’
Paul Coletti is a fourth-grade math teacher at Walden Lake Elementary School and serves as the camp director.
“If I could do this in the classroom five days a week, to me, it’s a game changer, because you’re getting away from reading in a textbook,” he said. “You’re taking the teacher’s guide that they’re giving you…and they’re creating and they’re failing, and they’re succeeding. It’s not based on tests. It’s not state scores. It’s just getting to be hands-on, minds-on, and playing.”
During the program, young campers between kindergarten and sixth grade, rotate from five classes.
• Physical education allows kids to take the fun outdoors and play activities
• Robotic Aquatics lets campers design a device to retrieve animals that live in the water and create a habitat for them inside a tank. It also requires kids to think outside the box as to the importance of robots and their survival in the ocean.
• The Attic lets campers use art, chemistry and other forms of science to build their own robot. The class also uses design thinking to bring creative ideas to fruition, and through intellectual property, campers learn how to preserve their ideas.
• The Spacecation class lets the youth learn more about technology used out in space. They also get to build their own crafts such as spacepacks and astro-arm devices, and observe ice volcanoes. Campers learn about asteroids, gravity-defying cooking, how animals hatch eggs and grow in space as well as certain astronauts and their functions
• With the Marble Arcade, campers will learn how to use physics, engineering, and gaming while designing and building and testing their own mega marble arcades. They will also be taught how mass and size affects movement.
“It pushes into that creative side,” Coletti said. “Some that are not creative, do the very best they can. Whatever works for you.”
This year, the Plant City program has 127 campers engaging in these activities while supervised by 58 staff members.
It is inclusive as it welcomes students outside of Plant City, and 20 to 25 schools are represented, Coletti said.
“The reputation of it has exceeded my expectations as far as people loving it,” Coletti said. “The feedback from everybody. The relationship with the Strawberry Festival, it’s just been a beautiful relationship as far as their help and their support.”
And while the program takes place outside of school, the same principles still apply.
Teachers and counselors continually emphasize the importance of respecting others – especially between campers who are meeting for the first time.
Camp Invention is a nationwide program that has served more than 1.9 million children 210,000 teachers and leadership interns, since 1990.
Every year it teaches approximately 130,000 students and is affiliated with over 1,800 schools.
Coletti has been affiliated with the Plant City branch since its inception eight years ago, and has served the one in Gainesville for 19 years.
Many of those who are counselors and teachers for each class are teachers in schools as well.
“Each teacher basically has the curriculum laid out for them. An overview, every day, of what they’re doing,” Coletti said.
Also, some of the high school students who are now counselors, were once students of Coletti’s back in fourth grade.
He hopes that the program will inspire the campers to steer toward a career related to the subject matter that they are exposed to and tries to help them reach their full potential.
“I’m waiting for the day when somebody actually graduates college and this is their career, and they come back,” Coletti said. “I’m waiting to get back to that point. We’re rooted in. I knew once this program got started here, it would grow roots, and now it’s just flourishing.”
