(76a) Engineering Camp At Bucknell University: Motivating Pre-College Students

Engineering Camp: A college experience for pre-college students

Each year Bucknell University hosts a week-long on-campus residential experience for roughly 100 post 7^th -11^th grade students focused on introducing the disciplines of engineering. Engineering camp introduces 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, the camp provides a college-like experience that is integral to building academic capital and a sense of belonging for students, particularly those from under-resourced schools.

During Camp students live in dormitories, eat in the university dining hall, go to class each morning, have laboratory sessions each 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 in STEM fields. Camp features highly active classroom and laboratory sessions that introduce these 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. The camp particularly reaches 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 would not have prepared themselves for or even considered an undergraduate major in the STEM fields.

In addition to classes in several engineering disciplines (chemical, biomedical, mechanical, electrical, civil, environmental), there are special topic discussions on everything from sustainability and green engineering to biomaterials and nanotechnology. Among the goals of the camp are for students to become familiar with a variety of engineering disciplines and to practice engineering design. Several of the assignments during the week have include elements of design and innovation, including “Redesign Your Town Green”, where students are asked to reduce the carbon footprint of residents of their towns by thinking about making communities more pedestrian-friendly or starting public programs that would encourage recycling or composting. Students are asked to propose new designs for common packaging as a way to reduce waste, to think about logical improvements to devices with which they are familiar, or to reverse-engineer processes or products. Throughout the camp, students make presentations and write reports; at the end of the camp, students give professional presentations to their families, friends, and fellow campers. All together, these activities significantly boost students’ confidence, interest, and identity in science, technology, and engineering.

During the camp, students spend more than 35 hours in classes and laboratories; an additional 28 hours of extracurricular activities are also scheduled. The significant laboratory component of the camp provides an opportunity to participate in intellectually stimulating hands-on experiments. Technical sessions indicated include faculty-lead sessions on structural engineering, biomechanics, food science, materials science, nanotechnology, and others as described above.

Engineering Camp at Bucknell was established in July 2008 with prior NSF support. In its first year, this program welcomed 26 8^th–10^th grade students aged 13-16 (10 girls, 16 boys); all but one were from local area schools, and many were from disadvantaged rural schools- schools in areas with a high percentage of low-income families and/or having limited course offerings in upper-level mathematics and science in the high school. Since its inception, camp has grown significantly to incorporate three tracks (post-7-9^th graders, 10^th graders, and 11^th graders) and a significantly expanded number of campers from a significantly expanded geographic reach of over 28 states: 2009 – 51 students, 2010 – 52 students, 2011 – 83 students, 2012 – 97 students, 2013 expected enrollment of 124 with another 40 on a growing wait-list. The camp introduces students to numerous engineering disciplines and faculty members from each department in the College of Engineering at Bucknell are involved as instructors, 16 faculty members in all for the 2012 session. For the 2011, 2012 and 2013 sessions, there were more applicants for slots than there were resources to meet them. The program is expected to grow to 200 students in 2014.

Campers come from a variety of educational and economic backgrounds. Currently, Camp recruits some students from partner schools in target rural and urban areas. An additional goal for Engineering Camp is to remove the mystique about 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. Camp provides a safe environment to become comfortable with residential living learning environments. Both class and laboratory content are challenging but tailored to be interesting to students aged 13-16. By engaging these students 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 all but eliminated.

The real problem with the current pre-college initiatives is that we are unable to reach all those students and schools that are most in need of this type of enrichment. The current tuition of Engineering Camp is too great a price for the most disadvantaged students. Parents are dissuaded from inquiring about programs for their children if they presume they will be unable to afford to allow their children to participate. These are the students we need to be targeting to make the greatest impact. These programs also need to target traditionally underrepresented groups, including women and minorities, by reaching out to schools through classroom visits to talk about the Engineering Programs. Students who feel there are barriers to their participation in programs of this type must be identified and encouraged, and financial support must be provided if real changes in undergraduate enrollments in STEM fields are to be impacted.

Many pre-college students, particularly those from disadvantaged school districts, are not exposed to engineering or related technological topics prior to their undergraduate education. It is hoped that an experience like Engineering Camp will motivate interest in pursuing a technical degree in the sciences and engineering.