A collaborative approach to offering summer engineering camps for middle school students

Engineering educators utilize K-12 outreach to encourage students to pursue careers in engineering. Engineering faculty choosing to undertake K-12 outreach often face time consuming administrative duties associated with such activities. Collaboration with outside organizations provides ways to become more involved in K-12 outreach. Non-profit tutoring organizations, arts and community centers, or science museums are possible collaboration partners. These organizations can prepare grant applications geared toward K-12 activities to get curriculum and equipment, promote and advertise to their audience with their other activities, and use their media contacts to publicize the program. This allows the engineering faculty to focus on the curriculum and students. This paper discusses the collaboration used to offer several week long summer engineering camps for middle school students, the activities included in each camp, and feedback received from camp participants, parents, and instructors. By partnering with an outside educational organization, the faculty increased their outreach activities with little additional cost or effort. The curriculum materials provided by the partnership, combined with the extra hands-on engineering activities incorporated by the instructors, created a unique engineering camp experience for the students. This resulted in improved student interest and instructor motivation for the outreach activity.