Camp Invention Research Project

The Camp Invention Research Project was an effort to improve understanding of how people learn over their lifespan by focusing on the role that learner’s prior interests, dispositions and motivations affected learning outcomes. Camp Invention is a one-week intensive creativity, entrepreneurship, and STEM education summer program. Like a number of other out-of-school programs, Camp Invention has been shown to significantly increase children’s interest and learning. However these programs typically only engage children for one week out of a lifetime of learning and represent just one small part of a larger ecosystem of learning. This “hypothesis-generating” study was designed to see how Camp Invention’s educational practices can best be improved by investigating what pre-camp factors seemed to most significantly contribute to changes in 11/12-year-old camp goers short- and long-term creativity, problem-solving and STEM interests. Findings were designed to help Camp Invention and other similar programs strategize how they can more effectively leverage their short-term programs to in order to better support each child’s unique, long-term growth and learning. ​

Project Team: John H. Falk Ph.D., David D. Meier M.S.,