Making Things Fly – Summer Camp – 2019

June 3 – 7; 12:30pm – 4:30pm

For kids in grades 6-8.

Looking for summer enrichment activities? Enroll your child in the Making Things Fly camp at Des Moines’ own Area 515 Maker Space.

As it says in the title, this camp is all about making things! At the heart of the scientific method is testing by experiment, and that is this camp’s focus. For example, we’ll start learning about forces and friction by using a nearly-friction-free environment, a hovercraft! How can you move around when you have no friction to push against? What do you use to generate a force to push you? Children will learn answers to these questions by experiment!

During the typical afternoon your child we be given a series of projects to build and a variety of materials and tools to create those projects. They will then be set free to work under adult supervision. Some projects will have specific instructions, like AMA Cub airplane, others will be more open-ended, like the windmill. Each project is focused on a certain aspect of flight, and at the end we will examine what we made to see what worked well and what didn’t.

For some projects there may be challenges to see whose creation goes the furthest or stays in the air longest, but the focus of the camp is on cooperation.

Kids will build all kinds of flying things in order to learn how they get off the ground. In the process they will learn about scientific big ideas like forces, density, and buoyancy. Some of the projects kids will be working on include: