This week, the cafeteria at East Hampton High School was buzzing with innovation, ingenuity, and imagination, as Camp Invention took over, welcoming kids from kindergarten through fifth grade to develop their STEM skills through hands-on projects and problem-solving activities.
The four-day camp program was developed by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and is run locally by the co-principals of East Hampton’s summer school, Toni Ann Schmitt and Teresita Winter, who kept the kids busy from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through today.
“They’re active all day,” Ms. Winter said.
On the first day of camp, the kids created their own capybara toys and learned about the animal as part of Fur-ensics camp — which teaches children how to use forensic science to solve a mystery.
“This is my little capybara. They’re the biggest rodent in the world,” said Hank Lubert, who is 6 and three-quarters, and will be in first grade at the John M. Marshall Elementary School next month. “Capybaras give other animals rides. So if turtles are small and they can’t cross a big river, a capybara would give them a ride.”
“They had magnifying glasses and microscopes and goggles and they were building and gluing and had such a ball interacting with each other,” said Ms. Schmitt.
On Tuesday morning they were building vaults.
“We’re making safes for our ideas so those little creatures don’t steal them,” said Ryann Smith, 6, pointing to a brightly colored paper creature known as an infringer at Camp Invention. The students also learned about copy-cats and plagiarizers.
“It’s a little box. We still need to add some more stuff in it. We’re trying to make it as nice as we can and trying to make it look like a safe,” said Naomi Garcia, 7.
“It’s a safe and that’s the passcode,” said Avielle Crozier, 7, showing the numbers inside her vault and the pop tubes it was protecting.
“This unit is about movement,” Ms. Schmitt explained. “They’re going to be creating mobiles to show them how gears work. They’ll light up. They’re coming up with all of these solutions together. It’s all about team building and cooperative work. In addition to the invention aspect of it, they have to balance cups and see how high they can build a tower. They are creating environments or habitats for animals and drawing them on paper and drawing them on maps and the vehicles can go through those maps.”
Students from all of the local schools — Montauk to Sag Harbor — were invited to participate. About 30 signed up, most of them from John Marshall. The four-day camp cost $200.
“We wanted to make something accessible,” Ms. Schmitt said. “That is a priority first and foremost. Local kids should have a place to go. We wanted it to be for families that are working, this way their kids could be here, having fun. They’re safe. They bring a bagged lunch. We provide snacks for the kids. They’re just having a ball.”
“You can do crafts. You can draw. You can create things and lots of stuff like that,” said Delanea Guzman, 7, who was a big fan of Camp Invention.
Even the middle schoolers who participated gave it two thumbs-up.
“We can create and use our imagination,” said Decker Cangiolosi, 11, who goes to East Hampton Middle School. His cousin, Leo Brown, 11, agreed. “We make a lot of different things and I think that’s cool.”
Information about registering for Camp Invention 2027 will be sent out via ParentSquare starting next spring.