Stimulating an Interest in Engineering Through an "Explore Engineering and Technology" Summer Camp for High School Students

Abstract

Attracting a larger number of young people to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) careers is critical to the United States being able to remain globally competitive. One increasingly popular approach by colleges and universities to this end is to offer on-campus STEM summer camps to high school and middle school students. Our College has offered one-week Robotics summer camps for high school and middle school students every summer since 2009. The Robotics camps fit naturally with the large number of FIRST Robotics teams in our area whose students welcome the opportunity to continue learning and practicing skills in the off-season. For the 2013 high school summer camp however, engineering faculty in the Division decided to broaden the scope of the camp to introduce a wider population of students to engineering and technology. The “Explore Engineering and Technology” camp attracted a full group of 27 students in its first run, out of which eight were female. The one-week camp was structured around different engineering disciplines civil, computer, electrical, mechanical, and optical engineering. A total of nine instructional modules, each three-and-a-half-hour long, were developed and taught by engineering faculty during the camp. Groups of students rotated through morning and afternoon sessions conducted in our engineering laboratories. They were given an introduction to fundamental engineering principles followed by hands-on experimentation in the lab. In addition to the faculty members teaching the program, a couple of undergraduate engineering students were present to help and mentor, which turned out to be a great learning experience for them. To conclude the camp, participants were asked to choose one of the modules from which to prepare and give an oral presentation during the last session. A competition for the top three presentations was set-up and awards were given. The paper discusses the content of the modules and the results of the camp as evidenced by student presentations and student surveys. The camp was successful in increasing students’ interest and confidence in pursuing careers in engineering and technology. Lessons were also learned from the first offering of the camp leading to plans for future improvement. These include development of a Workbook/Lab Manual summarizing all modules for students to use during the camp as well as keep for future reference. Future plans also include adding new activities and experiments to accommodate both new and returning students. Introduction STEM summer camps for high school and even middle school students offered on campus by colleges and universities have become extremely popular in the past decade. The Engineering Education Service Center (EESC), a company providing resources to K-12 educators to help promote STEM areas with a focus on Engineering, is compiling and publishing a directory of summer camps 1 , organized by state. Without being exhaustive, the directory includes hundreds of camps and offers a valuable glimpse into the variety of camps that are available. An important objective of summer camps is to stimulate and increase interest, as well as confidence, in pursuing a STEM or engineering career among young people, including under-represented minorities. This is a very important goal as STEM based occupations are expected to increase in the future 2 , while the enrollment in STEM programs in the United States continues to lag behind 3 . Another objective of summer camps is to introduce students to the campus of the university or college offering the camp and to help with future student recruitment. A good grouping of various summer camps is provided by Robert Fletcher in a paper presented at the ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition in 2010 4 . According to Fletcher there are four types of summer camp programs: “