Spare parts lined the halls at Crowder College this morning, waiting for young inventors to claim them.
Computers, an old radio, a projector, smoke detector, coffee pots, ice cream makers and fans mingled with Styrofoam packing materials and old newspapers. Some were brought in by the children at Camp Invention, others were scrounged from the recycling center.
“We never know what’s going to be drug in here,” said camp co-director Aimee Renfro.
It’s the fourth year for Crowder to host the camp in Neosho. Co-directors Tracy Guest and Renfro says the camp inspires children – including their own – to make things. After last year’s camp, Renfro’s children spent their allowance on duct tape and filled the front porch with their creations. Her own childhood memories include bringing home refrigerator boxes to transform into hideouts.
“It’s amazing what they can build with duct tape and trash,” Renfro said.
The program is part of the non-profit organization Invent Now Kids.
Kids rotate through five modules – Hatched, Power’d, SMArt: Science, Math and Art, I Can Invent III and Global Games – working in teams and learning about how things work.
Six-year-old Aidan Moorehead was focused on his coffee pot as he pried out screws.
“I’m going to make it into a robot that cleans up my room,” Moorehead said.
It was the first time his neighbor Sam Mitchell had taken something apart, but Mitchell was undaunted.
“There’s going to be tons of computer chips in here,” Mitchell said as he pried the back off a keyboard. “I’m gonna make like a little machine.”
There was a lot of building going on Tuesday morning. Campers were making aqueducts at one station and animated “creatures” at another by placing a motor inside carved foam bodies. Homework the night before was to find a picture of a fractal, a geometric shape that when split is the same as its parent shape.
The camp runs throughout the week on Crowder’s Neosho campus and the organization has another camp next week at Crowder’s Webb City campus.
This year the Neosho camp had 63 campers.
“It gets a little bigger every year,” Guest said. “I think we have a better time than the kids do some days.”
