What an incredible summer! I visited every one of our 26 camps, and everywhere I looked I was reminded of our central purpose: empowering kids to engage in creative action. Before camp began, I issued a challenge to our staff to inspire at least one child every day to turn his or her idea into a creative design or solution. The results were amazing.

At Camp Galileo, I watched campers craft their own coral reefs, construct multi-layer Egyptian temples and finally succeed in getting their custom-crafted airplane models to fly. At Galileo Summer Quest, I witnessed go-kart parades, innovative red-carpet fashion shows and fantastic culinary experiments in our new Kitchen Chemistry Minor. Everywhere I looked, campers were engaged in creative action, transforming their ideas into things the world has never seen before. I hope that your campers were as excited by what they created at camp as I was watching them create it.

We’re already looking forward to next summer, when Galileo Summer Quest campers will have new Majors and Minors to choose from and Camp Galileo campers will explore four new curriculum themes, encountering an eccentric designer in need of some playful assistance, a creative caper in need of a solution, one city that needs designing from the ground up and another full of forbidden secrets.

We can’t wait to see you in 2011!

Creative Action has been the cornerstone of everything we do. We’ve stressed that our approach to learning and exploration is bigger than the few weeks a camper spends with us during the summer and that our goal is to nurture a creative mindset in our campers – encouraging them to seek out answers to problems, while overcoming any fears they may have that could impede the process – that they will keep with them long after camp ends.

The importance of nurturing creativity is starting to catch on. Newsweek’s recent article on The Creativity Crisis precisely identified our concern:

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

[...]In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity. Preschoolers who spend more time in role-play (acting out characters) have higher measures of creativity: voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives. When playing alone, highly creative first graders may act out strong negative emotions: they’ll be angry, hostile, anguished. The hypothesis is that play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.

In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.

From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function. Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity—not having loads of it—is the real risk factor.

We know that creative people are “engaged, motivated, and open to the world,” because we see it every day with our campers.

It’s hard to believe that this is our ninth season! As I reflect on where we are, I am so proud of how we’ve grown and what we have accomplished. There have definitely been challenges along the way, but each year we learn from them and celebrate what we do well. I attribute our success to a few main reasons:

1) We are great listeners and really value feedback from our customers and staff. Since our very first summer we have created systems to ensure that we can really understand what we are doing well and what we can do to improve. Our camps today reflect the feedback we’ve received from thousands of parents, campers and staffers. This will always be part of what we do so we can continue to learn and improve.

2) We focus on creating a strong culture at each camp. We invest a lot of time in finding dynamic leaders to run our camps, so even though the program is the same, each camp location really reflects the personality and passion of each Camp Director and his or her staff. We value and encourage creativity and give our Camp Directors a lot of ownership in how they want to create it. So much of the magic, fun and spirit of what campers experience is a direct result of this.

3) We are all committed to our mission and have a strong set of company values. Every staffer who works for Galileo, whether they work year round or just during camp, is so inspired by what we do. We are all committed to having a positive impact on kids’ lives, the communities we serve and our staff’s professional growth. We also really value how we work with and support each other. I had never before experienced being part of such an inspiring, positive and supportive work environment.

We have definitely learned a lot these last nine years and it hasn’t always been easy. There have been so many people who have worked so hard to make this happen. I continue to be honored and feel so lucky that I get to be part of this movement. We are just getting started… I can’t wait for what lies ahead!

This post was written by our Vice President of Field Operations Tajalli Horvat.

Many people may call what we do simply summer camp, but to those of us on the inside – the staff, the campers, the families – we know that what we are doing is much greater than that. We are part of a movement. What kind of movement, you might ask? A movement to better equip kids to be actors in the world. Yes, our programs do a lot of things. We teach science, art, outdoor games, go-kart building and journalism. We have fun, we build community, we show kids what it means to participate in a joy-filled learning community.  But if you were to ask me what our number one, most central purpose is, I would say it’s to empower kids to engage in Creative Action.

Creative Action is an individual or group expression that changes the world.  It might be something on a very personal, local level, or it might be something grand that affects thousands.  It’s really just a vision, leading to ideas, leading to action. Then repeat.

This is our call to action. Thousands and thousands of children will come to Galileo Learning camps this summer. In fact, 12,000 children will attend our programs for a total of 25,000 weeks.  And amongst all the fun, the painting, the building, the waterball games, the skits and the songs, we must remember that above all what we must do is teach them to be actors in the world. Not just recipients of what the world offers up, but actors in it. This is the movement we must pursue.

At the onset of summer, I issued two challenges to our staff.  First, be an actor yourself.  This camp is not something that is happening to you.  You are happening to it. Think of yourself as an artist, and your camp as your canvas. Make every single day a work of art.  Second, find at least one child every day that you can inspire and equip to be an actor in the world.  Ask that child, “What is your vision? What are your ideas?” And when they try something that doesn’t work, say, “Fantastic, that’s part of inventing. What’s next?”

If we do these things this summer, and carry them with us everywhere we go in the future, I believe our kids will grow up to truly dazzle us with the world they create.