While school may be out for the summer, Ottawa Central Intermediate School’s halls are still filled with students thanks to Camp Invention, a weekly summer school where children learn about machinery, ecology and invention.

Director Katelyn Caputo said the curriculum is made up of four programs: Robotic Aquatics, Space-cation, Marble Arcade and The Attic, which is where children go to learn about the National Inventors Hall of Fame and all of the different inventors and inventions.

In Robotic Aquatics, students learned pollution and discovered ways machines can be used to clean up the ocean floor, along with how to create a safe habitat for jellyfish amid pollution. Anakin and Tanner, two of the students, used bendy straws to make seaweed to make habitats for their jellyfish. (Students sir name’s were withheld in the article).

“I put plants everywhere and made friends for him,” Tanner said. “I needed a way to keep it clean, and we learned about symbiotic relationships.”

Symbiotic relationships meaning children learned about how a small change to the environment can have lasting effects where people may not realize.

The students also built simple machines, which teacher Kelsey Sheridan said they used to combine to create complex machines in the Marble Arcade. Children built Rube Goldberg-style machines to send marbles down a chute, and were then given the tools to make the marbles travel faster or slower depending on the machine’s needs. If the marble moved too fast, the students needed to find out how to add friction by using different materials or adding twists.

“From there they add more to it and it’s all independent once I give them the basic idea,” Sheridan said. “I don’t really have to teach. It’s their creativity and inventiveness.”

Third-grader Esteban built a shoot that started out high, around 5 1/2 feet off the ground that lowered into a gentle slope to slow it down at the bottom. Each child had a different idea on how to achieve their goals: Some added many, many twists and turns to manipulate the marble in the way they wanted to.

The children also worked on a project where they created a fan that they built themselves: First graders Braylee and Bella demonstrated a battery operated machine that only spins when one end of its wire is attached to a battery. While the wire is attached, the students used a marker to draw designs on a piece of paper attached to the fan to create artwork.

That course, Caputo said, is about animations and cartoons and allowing students to understand what goes into making them. Children spent time earlier in the week creating colors of their own, which they got to name after mixing all kinds of different colors together with paint.

In another room, sixth grader’s Onyx and Kaleb showed off their inventions created as part of the Space-cation class: Every student got to create jetpacks, complete with a functional attachment arm that operates on a hydraulic created using water.

“We had to attach the arm and attach it to our space pack,” Onyx said. “We tested it out by making pizza with it.”

Caputo said this year’s program had 87 children enrolled, the most it’s had in years since Camp Invention has had to go virtual because of COVID.

“Usually, we get funds from a few different local businesses that help pay for kids to come but this year got structured very different because of a Summer Enrichment grant the district received,” Caputo said. “So, we’re using half of the money this year and half of it next year, and that money went towards scholarships for kids to come.”

Patti Mezel, another teacher, said all of the projects go home with parents at the end of the program on Friday, and everything was built using recyclable materials. Many of these materials are ones children brought to the camp themselves.

Camp Invention ended Friday with an open house for parents to see what kinds of inventions their children came up with.