Mad Science

Eureka Camp

Enjoy a week of fun-filled, hands-on, invention-themed activities highlighting inventors that changed our world through their explorations. With a bit of ingenuity, children work through challenges using basic materials, simple machines, and the best tool of all, their minds. Features cool gadgets that kids design and make!

ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

Inventing means curiosity! Leonardo da Vinci started as an artist and developed many scientific observations that he recorded in his notebooks over the course of his lifetime. Children learn about his many discoveries and repeat some of his experiments, like writing notes backwards, measuring human proportions, building a self-supporting arch bridge, and building catapults. The budding inventors bring home their da Vinci designs and devices at the end of the day.

WHIZ KIDS

Inventing means practicality! While inventors Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla battled over electrical inventions in their era, campers work together in our day. They recreate Tesla’s bright atmosphere for the 1893 World’s Fair and talk through the techniques of making and carrying sound over great distances. After moving from simple devices to a complex human-machine, campers prepare a lab sign for their home-based labs.

SHIPWRECKED

Inventing means necessity! Archimedes and Benjamin Franklin both created devices to make their society function smoother. This day puts children on a deserted island on which they must work together to innovate ways to collect food and water and build shelters and bridges. They use the tools at hand to write messages to send in a bottle and witness a volcanic eruption. The children eventually design a boat to escape the island and learn how a magnet can help search for shipwrecks.

THINK FAST

Inventing means cooperation! Mrs. Wright shared her engineering know-how with her kids. Kitty, Orville, and Wilbur Wright worked together to develop the first self-controlled motorized flying machine. Working together, the Wright siblings improved bicycle pedals, faster sleds, and made cool toys. Campers review technological advances in flight and work together to produce improved paper plane designs. They work as a group to put historical flight events in chronological order. The children then step into space by launching self-built rockets and loading a payload capsule puzzle. These flight fanatics go home with a squadron of paper airplanes for further test flights.

SCIENCE FICTION

Inventing means dreaming! Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov are one of many science fiction writers who developed the reality of their current technology into future possibilities. The children are challenged to develop submarines that rise or sink, space stations that spin, and safety capsules for payloads returning from space. The children decipher fact from fiction and play a future-based bingo game. These future inventors get a lesson on lasers, build a light stick and work on protecting a spaceship from damaging space rays. The camp wraps up with a robotic relay and the children take home dreams of the future and new planets to explore.