MIDLAND Carter West, 9, is one of many children who enjoys building objects with Legos.
He hopes to use that passion to someday become a master builder.
West is one of numerous students who have been in attendance at the Lego Mini Masters: Shakin’ City Summer Camp which is currently going on this week at the Petroleum Museum in Midland.
“I like this camp because I love Legos,” West said. “I just love creating things with my mind.”
The camp, which is for children ages 8-12, began on Monday and will wrap up on Thursday.
It’s one of many educational camps that the museum offers during the summer months.
During the camp, children learn to construct buildings and other structures such as bridges that can withstand natural disasters like earthquakes and tornadoes.
“We have different engineering projects set up throughout the camp centered around natural disasters or weather that we’re talking about like tornadoes,” Director of Education and Marketing at the Petroleum Museum Mara Bland said.
On Monday, the children worked on earthquakes so they built Lego structures that could try and withstand an earthquake simulator.
On Wednesday, Bland says the children will be engineering bridges out of Legos before breaking them. Similar activities will take place on the last day of camp on Thursday.
“There’s going to be a few engineering activities with our maker carts using a breaking bridge so the way that bridges are designed to, instead of completely falling apart, they collapse in,” Bland said. “That will finish up the rest of the week.”
On Tuesday, the children worked on structures that could withstand a tornado.
Each day, the camp lasts from 8 a.m.-noon.
Bland says that each day is split up into two sets of stations where, depending on what topic they’re doing, the children will try to have an engineering project and build something that they can take home with them.
“We provide them with brainstorm sheets to work with the engineering design process,” Bland said. “Then they test and retest their structures throughout the morning.”
Anya Furtado, 9, is another participant at the camp.
“It’s super fun coming here,” Furtado said of the camp. “It’s one of my favorite places to be.”
Her favorite part of the camp is doing experiments and making things.
“I usually make the biggest engineering projects in the class,” Furtado said.
The camps are educational and Bland says the children enjoy playing with Legos.
“They love the Legos,” Bland said. “That’s probably the biggest hit. … The bridges will probably be the biggest thing that they’ll build because they have to be two-feet long and they have to raise and build an actual bridge structure so they have to choose one of the existing structures and replicate that.”
During the museum’s Summer Science Camps, students engage in various experiments, creative activities and robotic design.
Other camps the museum has had throughout the summer included Rockin Rockets, which was for ages 6-8, where students investigated geodes and core samples as well as creating rockets and more.
Lego Robotics, which was also for ages 6-8, engaged students to explore the world of coding and science as well as technology, engineering and math through team building activities, utilizing Lego robotics equipment.
There was also Wild about Science (ages 6-8) which allowed children to learn about animal classifications, adaptations, ecosystems and more.
The museum’s Making Makers camp (ages 8-12) helped students engage in hands-on STEM challenges and inventive projects.
“All of our camps have different topics,” Bland said. “Depending… they’re all very STEM-based so we try to focus on the engineering based process. We do provide additional information and all of the folders that they take home. But we’re really working on sparking that curiosity and interest in science and STEM and helping them understand that they can do anything that they put their minds to and we’re working through that whole process of understanding of having a problem and having a solution without having a step by step guide to do that.”
While summer might be coming to a close, Bland says the museum will offer other camps during the fall including Building Bots classes.
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