Kids get scientific at summer camp

Kids, scapels in hand, prepare for surgery. They sit side-by-side at a table. They receive their patients: Licorice sticks.

The sticks are clogged with Nerds, the small, pebble-shaped candy. The kids make tiny incisions in the licorice, remove the offending Nerds, and cover the cut with a generous layer of Fruit by the Foot. After their hard work, they devour their repaired patients.

Their surgeries are roughly similar to artery repair.

These kids (13 in total) were part of the Science Celebration summer camp at 27 2nd Avenue North in Yorkton. The camp ran from August 21-25. 

The camp was put on by the Saskatchewan Science Centre. Casey Sakires, the manager of programming at the centre, calls the week-long program the “first inaugural satellite camp.”

“We [took] all of the best day camp activities that worked throughout the summer [in Regina] and [took] them on the road to Yorkton,” he said.

The Science Centre hosted summer camps in Regina that focused on four themes: “Oh, Canada,” “Science Surprise,” “Planet Earth,” and “Me, Myself, and I.” The centre picked the best activities from all the camps and combined them into this one satellite camp. It was called  “Science Celebration.”

Yorkton is the first town in Saskatchewan to experience this satellite camp. Sakires hopes they can expand on the camp and take it around the province in the future.

“We’re not limited to Regina,” he said. “Science is everywhere.

“If we can take science on the road, we definitely do that.”

Natalie Bolen, a science educator for the centre, is one of two staff members who ran the camp in Yorkton. She’s led activities such as birdseed mining, building a miniature national park, and creating sock-octopuses.

“It’s been really great and these kids are fantastic,” she said. “They just get so into it.

“This has been a really great week.”