KIDS & FAMILIES

Boston’s third annual Inventgenuity Festival, presented by Beam Camp, fills The Arlington Center for the Arts with fun and engaging hands-on activities. With public projects and workshops led by Beam Center’s faculty of artists, engineers and big thinkers, the Inventgenuity Festival has become a popular annual winter celebration of making things for kids and their parents.

At the Inventgenuity Festival, kids will playfully and productively investigate what digital technology and manual mechanisms have in common. In two days of hands-on workshops and on-going collective projects led by expert makers and manipulators of sound, image, electricity, and motion kids will explore this year’s theme, DIGITAL BY HAND.

Says Beam Camp’s Co-Founder Danny Kahn: “We love watching kids jump behind and beyond the screen to discover how the magic is made and meeting the artists and engineers that make it through nothing less than hard work, persistence and imagination. We feel it’s our job, our mission really, to physicalize and make play out of concepts that are generally veiled in mystery and expertise.”

In the weekend’s big Project designed by Allen Riley, “Physical Video Processing Unit,” kids will become the bits and bytes of a room-sized video machine using physical materials to edit and transform video. Participation in the project is free. Attendees may also sign-up for one of the rotating slate of 45-minute workshops. Scheduled workshops will explore DIGITAL BY HAND through Handpowered Animated GIFs (Brett Van Aalsburg), Crazy Cursor Bots (Reid Bingham), Origami LED Pixels (Susan Ngo), LED Fortune Tellers (Eun Jung (EJ) Park), and Embroidered Emoticons (Julie Schneider).

Boston Inventgenuity Festival takes place on the third floor of Arlington Center for the Arts on Saturday, March 2 and Sunday, March 3 from 11am - 5pm. Admission to the festival is free, registration required (http://www.beamcamp.com/inventgenuity/). Advance online reservations for workshops ($8.25 materials fee) are available. All workshops will repeat throughout the day; most workshops will be available both days of the festival.

ABOUT BEAM CAMP Beam Camp is an overnight summer program offering two 4 week summer sessions (6/27-7/21 and 7/25-8/18) for boys and girls aged 7-17 in Strafford, New Hampshire. At Beam kids learn to make their ideas happen through fine and manual arts, technology and collaboration. Beam Campers cultivate hands-on skills while exploring innovative thinking, design and the creative process.