Imagine & Invent

Imagine & Invent turns kindergarten and first-grade curiosity into twelve hours of making. Children discover that every object around them was shaped by a person to do a job, then step into that role themselves: sketching plans, choosing materials, building working tools, and testing whether each creation truly meets a need. Along the way they investigate pushes and pulls, light and sound, and the clever survival designs found in nature, so every build is grounded in real science.

The second half of the course adds a gentle on-ramp to computer science. Students guide floor robots with direction words, write and act out unplugged instruction lists, and graduate to block-based animation, where they storyboard animal tales and code multi-scene stories with event triggers and multiple characters. Every lesson spends half its hour learning an idea and half putting it to work, so nothing is explained that is not immediately built, tested, or performed.

The course closes with a story-premiere showcase where families watch original animated tales and hear five- and six-year-olds explain, in their own words, how they planned, built, tested, and improved everything on display. Everything is made from ordinary classroom supplies — paper, crayons, cardboard, tape, string — plus the durable equipment a school already owns: a floor robot, tablets, flashlights, and measuring tools.