Reinventing A Day at the Museum
Camp Invention Helps Make Museum Visits More Fun
How do museums come up with such clever programs for kids? The National Museum of Education provides ideas for activities for exploring a kid's favorite museum.
Camp Invention is one of a variety of museum activity programs created by the National Museum of Education for educators and parents. The NMOE designed, organized, and implemented the initial camps and serves as National Camp Consultant. The Camp Invention curriculum includes instructions for aligning the program with state and national education standards for grades one through six.
Camp Explore has three components. Camp Explore challenges children to explore physics concepts to complete a secret mission. Along the way, they experiment with engineering principles. They keep an Inventor’s Log of their work and learn how to apply for a U.S. patent.
Camp Create is an opportunity for children to use creative and critical-thinking skills to survive after they crash land on a strange planet. Two leading manufacturers have recruited the Camp Invention team to improve safety feature design for transportation vehicles.
Camp Experience, the third component, is a problem-solving module where children design and construct inventions to solve daily problems.
Camp Invention features the National Inventors Hall of Fame®. It was founded by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations.
The camps are offered on a rotating schedule in order to ensure that children can return to the program year after year and never have the same experience twice. Children play a variety of games in which they have a chance to change the four main aspects of a game: players, equipment, area, and rules and even invent games of their own.
The Camp Invention curriculum is used by schools across the United States. It is also used by a small number of innovative museums like the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery in Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Society of Natural History is the parent organization of the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery.
The Boonshoft Museum offers a week-long Camp Invention as part of their innovative summer programming. The BMD is place where play and learning come together so that visitors of all ages can explore the wonders of the world. The Museum includes a host of places for adventure and two galleries for temporary exhibits. Adventures are enhanced utilizing real specimens and artifacts from the Museum’s collection of 1.4 million items.
The Octave Chanute Aerospace Museum in Rantoul, Illinois, has implemented Camp Invention as an annual summer event. Chanute is a former air force base. The museum preserves and interprets the story of the 99th Pursuit Squadron in World War II Italy. Chanute Air Base was one of the original training centers for the “all negro” squadrons of WW II. Over 250 enlisted men were trained at Chanute and they became the core of other black squadrons such as the Tuskegee Airmen.
The Children's Discovery Museum in uptown Normal, Illinois, offers Camp Invention as a summer camp. CDM has a history of collaborating with the local Bloomington Junior High School, local scout troops, and preschool through third graders. The Camp Invention curriculum is a natural fit for this busy museum that offers nearly daily activities.
The Camp Invention website provides detailed information for teachers and parents along with registration information.
