Engineering Camp: A Residential Experience Designed to Build Academic Capital in Pre-college Students

Engineering Camp is a one-week on-campus residential program that exposes pre-college (post 7 th -11 th grade) students to engineering disciplines through introductory seminars, demonstrations, laboratory experiments, and design challenges. The program improves students‟ awareness of the breadth of engineering and emphasizes the benefit of developing skills in STEM. The camp is offered in grade-based parallel sessions geared to the audience, and campers can return in subsequent summers. Importantly, Camp provides a college-like experience that is integral to building academic capital and a sense of belonging for students. During Camp students live in dormitories, eat in the university dining hall, go to class and laboratory sessions each morning and afternoon, enjoy an active “social life” (under close supervision), and get a full college experience. The main goal of the camp is to introduce students to engineering disciplines in a way that motivates and prepares them for undergraduate majors. Camp features highly active classroom and laboratory sessions that introduce technical topics not through lecture or „cook-book‟ laboratory, but through active, collaborative, and problem-based learning approaches shown to be not only more effective at fostering student understanding than traditional approaches, but also superior for retaining the most diverse audience of learners 1-4 . Campers come from a variety of educational and economic backgrounds. We particularly reach out to students in urban and rural under-resourced schools who might not otherwise be exposed to topics in engineering and technology before graduation, and therefore may not have prepared themselves for or even considered an undergraduate major in a STEM field. One of the many goals of Engineering Camp is to remove the mystique of going to college and majoring in a technical field. Many of the campers, particularly those from under-resourced urban and rural areas, would be first-generation college students without the family academic capital that could help them prepare for university processes 5 . Camp provides an opportunity to become comfortable with the residential living-learning environment. Both class and laboratory content are challenging but tailored to be interesting to students aged 13-16. By engaging campers in activities that closely mimic those of typical undergraduates in an engineering or technical major, their apprehension about college in general, and difficult curricula in particular, are significantly lessened.