Invent Wisconsin

This summer has been very eventful! For the first time, we hosted returning 2023 Spark Your Imagination Summer Camp students for a special "2.0" version of camp in mid-August. 7 students were able to return to invent again with many fun twists and additions, including...
🧪A visit from a local Amcor Packaging Chemical Engineer and Inventor to discuss patents and inventive food packaging.

💥A field trip to the LU Makerspace at Seeley G Mudd Library at Lawrence University to learn about 3D printing and paper circuits from Angela Vanden Elzen, Associate Professor and Reference and Learning Technologies Librarian.

🔨A visit from Ken, a Hearthstone Historic House Museum volunteer and master woodworker, to learn about inventing tools for hobbies and practice woodworking.

💻Hands-on practice with block coding and debugging (via Girls Who Code and MIT's Scratch) and Arduino programming.

🤝A surprise "merging" of inventors into teams, wherein each inventor had to find a way to use a part or aspect of the invention they individually built on Wednesday to make a new team invention on Thursday.

This camp was so much fun! It allowed returning students to really build on what they learned last year and see that inventing skills can be used in careers, hobbies, and for creative projects or games...and that you can work with others to improve your ideas! We are very proud of camp "2.0" and our amazing student inventors.

In July we hosted two sessions of our Spark Your Imagination Summer Camp! We had 10 students from Kimberly, Hortonville, Appleton, and Neenah schools and 3 of those students are part of the English Learner/Newcomer program at Ronald C. Dunlap Elementary School. As always, it was amazing to see the creative inventions they came up with and built in just 5 days at Hearthstone!

Yesterday, we hosted Girl Scouts from Camp Evelyn (Girl Scouts of Manitou)'s Wisconsin Voyagers camp for a tour of Hearthstone Historic House Museum! These campers from the Sheboygan area are spending the week on a road trip from Camp Evelyn to Door County, Green Bay, Appleton, and all the way to Madison! We are glad they could stop by Hearthstone during their Appleton visit!

We had a wonderful first day of camp today with 6 students from Greenville, Neenah, Kimberly, and Appleton!! We learned about Hearthstone Historic House Museum's history, discussed what inventions and innovations are (and inventions for inventions!), did experiments to learn about sound and electricity, and ended the day with a scavenger hunt around the Museum. We can't wait until tomorrow!