At a summer program for elementary school students now in its second year in Presque Isle, local educators are trying to offer kids interesting ways to discover their math and science potential.
Thirty-five elementary students from around northern Maine and with family ties to the region came to the University of Maine Presque Isle for Camp Invention, a weeklong activity program focused on science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.
The camp is part of a nationwide summer program sponsored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and it offers the kind of science and math experiences that students don’t often get at school, said Mena Irving, a recently retired health and science teacher from Washburn who’s one of the camp’s two instructors.
“It’s a very hands-on program,” Irving said. “There’s a little bit of instruction and then they create.”
The program, which costs $235, has four varying activities revolving around different themes, with the goals of fostering creativity and teamwork. Signs around the classrooms urge kids to embrace the sometimes messy process of brainstorming and think up lots of ideas.
In one activity, students put together small solar-powered “cricket bots” and build them small playgrounds and obstacle courses from recycled materials. Another activity gets kids thinking about business, nature and agriculture, challenging them to build a sustainable island resort using recyclable materials and arts crafts on a base of two small inflatable trees.
They also take apart recycled electronics like VCRs and use them to make something new, like a functional clock or a circuit board maze, and experiment with the science of slime, mixing cornstarch and water to create an oozing, “non-Newtonian” substance.
“This is discovery learning and that’s how kids learn the best,” said Lisa Dow, an eighth grade math and science teacher at Presque Isle Middle School and one of the camp’s instructors.
“I can give you a battery and a bunch of different things, and you can discover what conducts with the battery. It’s more efficient for me to tell you that metal is an excellent conductor. But that’s not fun, it doesn’t make you curious and you might not retain that.”
