A cool tradition—elementary school students inventing a new flavor of ice cream for sale at Iowa City’s Heyn’s Ice Cream—turns 20 this year.

The students are participating in the annual Jacobson Entrepreneurship Camp, sponsored by the Jacobson Institute for Youth Entrepreneurship, the week of July 11, at the new University of Iowa Kirkwood Regional Center in Coralville. The annual camp introduces children in grades five and six to the basics of starting and developing a business, answering such questions as what kind of business to start, how do businesses solve problems, and where does one find the money to start a business.

Campers brainstorm new business ideas and learn how to build their business through hands-on classroom exercises, field trips that include selling their products at the Iowa City Farmers Market Wednesday evening, and guest speakers.

The partnership with Heyn’s Ice Cream started when owner Paul Heyn visited the entrepreneur camp in 1996 to talk about his entrepreneurial life and how he manages an ice cream shop. That was also the first year he took suggestions on new ice cream flavors, promising to keep the winning flavor on the menu for 30 days so campers and their families could taste the results of their labor.

He also entertained students with stories, such as the time he tried to make licorice ice cream by putting chunks of licorice into a batch of vanilla. When the licorice froze, the edges became sharp as glass and cut up the inside of his mouth so badly when he ate it that he bled all over the place.

He couldn’t eat anything with salt in it for a week, he told the students.

Heyn was an annual highlight of the camp for 12 years, until he died of a heart attack in 2008. His successor, Peggy Cullivan-Park, has kept the tradition going. The Iowa City camp will be held July 11–15, and the winning ice cream flavor will be on the menu of the Iowa City store on First Avenue for 30 days. Heyn’s also partners with the Jacobson Institute for their Cedar Rapids camp, which was held the last week in June.

“Most of the time, the kids have liked the flavors they’ve developed. Creating a new ice cream flavor is a great way to teach the process of innovation and new product development,” says Dawn Bowlus, director of the Jacobson Institute for Youth Entrepreneurship. “And, more importantly, it is really fun to try something that you created.”

Monster Mash was one of the flavors that did work well. Developed by students in the 2007 camp, the flavor has been one of Heyn’s top sellers ever since.

This year’s new flavor will be unveiled at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, July 14.