Engineers of the future

By mid-July the prospective engineers of the Engineering Cool Stuff Camp braved the hot Delaware heat to learn about solar power and construction.

Now in its fifth year at the university, the camp welcomed its biggest group of kids yet, ranging from 7th to 10th grade.

"It's growing in popularity and we really haven't done much advertising, so it's amazing" says Kathy Werrell, assistant dean for Engineering Outreach Pre-College and Special Programs.

The camp was split into two sessions, one from July 12-16 and the other from July 19-23, each with 35 students.  The students engaged in activities that were interactive and intellectually stimulating from 9a.m. to 3p.m.

"We wanted them to be all hands-on engineering activities so the kids would have fun," Werrell says.

Those activities included making and racing solar powered cars, recreating structurally stable bridges and learning the food chemistry of ice cream.

"I could see how excited they were to build things — actually making something and seeing the results right there in front of them," camp counselor Nuha Ahmed says.

Ahmed, an electrical engineering graduate student, was part of the team of undergraduate and graduate students working with the kids.

"It was nice when grad students would help out with different activities, but they really enjoyed working with the kids," she says. "It was exciting to watch the kids get excited."

Ahmed says the engineering department helped inspire kids, while the kids learned how to think like engineers.

"They had to think for themselves as well, on how to percieve engineering, so they had time to work on their own inventions," she says.

One of those inventions involved creating a stable balsa wood structure strong enough to hold the university's stuffed animals—like our very own YouDee— in a simulated earthquake by using West Point design software to create such a structure.  

The additional help of the national organizations IGERT, the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship and SAMPE, the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering were also crucial to facilitating the hands-on component of the camp.  

Werrell says the students did outreach from IGERT and helped facilitate the making of the solar cars, an activity that had a large fan-base.

"They loved, loved, loved making solar cars, that was a big highlight," says junior Rachel Clark.

Though she personally did not have any engineering experience Clark says she still feels the camp sparked shared interests between kids and counselors.

"Camp in general is a really good idea to get middle school kids into science and for high school kids before they start their formal search, to see what the vibe is and see if engineering is what they want to pursue," she says.

Werrell says the camp evolves each year, with new ideas already in the works.  Even though the six hour day is packed with various activities-she says a guest speaker might come in during lunch time. However,  the camp will still continue to be widely interactive.

"We don't want to do a lot of talking at them, we want to be learning by doing," Werrell says.