A Highly Successful Summer Accelerator Math Program in a Hispanic Serving Institution

For three consecutive years, the Department of Engineering at Northern New Mexico College has offered a Summer Camp focused on accelerating students to prepare them for college math and to increase their interest in Information Engineering Technology and Mechanical Engineering and other STEM disciplines. The program has been very successful, as measured by the progress made by the students in their math skills. The student body is 85% Hispanic. The first two summer camps targeted high-school students, while the last summer focused on college freshmen students with low-level math skills. This paper describes the strategies used, the recruitment tools used, and the results obtained for three years of Summer Camps. One of the main results shows that an average participant student has improved their math skills the equivalent of one semester or even one year after working 60-90 hours, three hours a day, five days a week for four-six weeks. This is an increase in efficiency compared to the number of weeks that students spend on math courses either at the high school or in remedial math classes at the college. Although other summer boot camps for minority students focused on strategies to build a sense of self-confidence, this one is focused on improving the student math skills in a very expedite way and this helps indirectly to build their self-confidence.