The overheated market can sometimes induce adults to act like children — running down the aisles, fighting over who saw a piece first — but art fairs typically aren’t places where you see actual children.

Scope Hamptons, however, isn’t a typical art fair. When it opens Friday, the fair will be “overrun with kids,” the president of Scope, Alexis Hubshman, said in an interview. As part of his effort to give back to the communities where he holds his fairs, Mr. Hubshman asked Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City to organize educational activities at the fair, in exchange for being the beneficiary of tomorrow night’s opening benefit. The activities — which include building and racing toy sailboats, and making sculptures inspired by sea creatures — will be open, of course, to children of the fair’s patrons, but also to children from less privileged parts of the area, some of whom will be bused in.

“The last thing I want is to be the guy who comes in and makes his money and leaves,” Mr. Hubshman, who founded Scope in 2002 and now organizes fairs in Miami, New York, London, Basel, and Switzerland, said. “It’s important to me to leave something special behind.” This year, Mr. Hubshman incorporated part of Scope as a nonprofit, called the Scope Foundation, in order to derive some tax benefit from the artist grants and other donations the company has made since the beginning. In the first two years of Scope Hamptons, for instance, Scope made donations to local cultural institutions such as Guild Hall, the Parrish Art Museum, and the Music Festival of the Hamptons, as well as other nonprofits such as The Retreat, a shelter for battered women located in East Hampton.

Scope has grown enormously in the last few years, riding the rising tide of the contemporary art market. It is the second-biggest art fair in the world in terms of the number of exhibitors, Mr. Hubshman said. Scope Hamptons, which takes place in the 20,000-square-foot East Hampton Studios, features more than 60 exhibitors from around the world. After losing a little money in the first year, 2005, Mr. Hubshman said he “almost” broke even last year and expects to turn a profit this year.

And although Scope has raised exhibitor fees 50% in the last 1 1/2 years, to $47 a square foot, there is “a big waiting list” to get into the Hamptons fair, Mr. Hubshman said.

Dealers who have exhibited there say the combination of a good collector base and a low-key atmosphere makes it an enjoyable and profitable fair to work.

“It’s not a snob-appeal kind of event where everybody’s trying to jump ahead of somebody else,” Mike Weiss, the owner of Mike Weiss Gallery in Chelsea, said. Mr. Weiss, who has exhibited at Scope in the Hamptons, Miami, New York, and Basel, said the connections he’s made at the fairs have been crucial in his gallery’s growth. “I’m building a lot of collections right now in the Hamptons and New York because of being in Scope,” he said, speaking by cell phone on his way out to the East End to visit clients. “In the last few months we’ve done more business than in the whole previous year.”

Mr. Hubshman, meanwhile, is proud of the connections Scope itself is building to the community. On Friday, children will be bused to the fair from the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreation Center, a nonprofit center licensed by the New York State social services department. They will participate in the boat-making workshop and also get to look at the art in the fair. American Indian artists from the Shinnecock Reservation in Suffolk County will lead workshops to build largescale whale puppets, similar to the dragons that march in Chinese New Year parades.

Adults will have the opportunity to do more than shop, too. Creative Time will have an outdoor stand serving spiked lemonade, where people can browse the summer’s hot art books, and win books in games of badminton and boccie. Creative Time will also sell limited-edition beach bags by Jenny Holzer and Jack Spade.

For those who like art film Scope is sponsoring a Friday night screening at Salomon Contemporary in East Hampton of Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed’s “Stereomongrel,” a 10-minute magical realist film about a 12-year-old girl in a museum. (Part of it was filmed in the Whitney Museum of American Art.) The gallery will also show a trailer for Mr. Gispert’s new film, “(S)mother,” which will be screened in January at Mary Boone Gallery, in collaboration with Zach Feuer Gallery.

The owner of Salomon Contemporary, James Salomon, who is also an associate director at Mary Boone, said he was delighted to work with Mr. Hubshman. “I believe in what Alex is doing out here,” he said. “He is not only nurturing an art market, but an arts community.”