Honoring Camp Invention Alum Charlie Bledsoe’s Legacy of Creativity

Charlie Bledsoe gave us all a shining example of the creative, innovative spirit Camp Invention^® is designed to spark in every child. Now, thanks to donations to the Charlie Bledsoe Memorial Scholarship, a newly named fund of the National Inventors Hall of Fame^® Endowment, more kids in Charlie’s hometown of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, will have the opportunity to join in this inspiring K-6 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) summer program for years to come.

Remembering Charlie’s Creativity

When Charlie passed away in 2018 at age 10, his family chose to partner with the National Inventors Hall of Fame to raise support for a permanent fund to provide local children with scholarships to Camp Invention. It is our privilege to help honor Charlie’s memory and to share his legacy of creativity.

Charlie’s parents, Valette Piper-Bledsoe and Alex Bledsoe, saw how much Charlie loved participating in Camp Invention and wanted to ensure more children could take part in the same kinds of hands-on, confidence-building camp experiences that allowed Charlie to experiment, investigate and invent.

“Charlie was a very creative and unique thinker,” his mother shared. “I think that’s why he loved Camp Invention so much — it’s a place where ideas are encouraged. Even if they don’t work out, that’s OK because it was an experiment and you tried.”

A smart, artistic child with a wonderful imagination and sense of humor, Charlie loved to read, write, draw and create. Reflecting on some of Charlie’s favorite camp experiences, his mother described how he enjoyed not only building inventions, such as a smart robot, but also engaging in take-apart experiences.

By reverse engineering, campers get to look inside different kinds of technology to see how they work — an excellent opportunity for curious kids like Charlie. “There was a lot of opportunity for exploration, and you don’t necessarily get a lot of that in your day-to-day schooling,” his mother explained.

Another highlight for Charlie was the opportunity to interact with older students who served as Leaders-in-Training at camp. While assisting Camp Invention Instructors, these middle school students encourage campers through every creative problem-solving challenge.

“He liked hanging out with the big kids,” Charlie’s mother said. “These were kids that were sometimes friends with his older brother [Jacob], and I think having not just that peer-to-peer interaction, but the older kid interaction, was something he really liked.”

At the end of each week Charlie spent at Camp Invention, he was excited and proud to show his family what he’d been creating. “He would talk all about it during the week, but to actually show us everything he did was his very favorite part.”

Sharing the Camp Invention Experience

Charlie’s younger sister Amelia has also attended Camp Invention, and their mother said, “She loved it just as much as he did. She was just as excited as he was to bring [her inventions] home.”

The desire to give more children the chance to engage in meaningful, innovative experiences is something the entire Bledsoe family shares.

“We love Camp Invention in our family and firmly believe that all kids, no matter their economic background, should be able to be excited about opportunities for creativity,” said Charlie’s mother.

Thanks to generous donors, the Charlie Bledsoe Memorial Scholarship is now a named fund of the endowment and will be sustained into the future to benefit the next generation of creators, innovators and entrepreneurs in Mount Horeb.

Each scholarship made possible by this endowed fund will give a local child with financial need the valuable opportunity to join their peers at Camp Invention, where they will develop an innovative mindset and unlock their potential through hands-on learning experiences inspired by National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductees.

With every lesson they learn, idea they sketch and invention they build, these future campers will bring a unique spark of creativity to the world — just like Charlie.

Learn More

To learn more about Camp Invention and how you can get involved in helping this beloved program reach even more kids, please visit our website.