Summer engineering academy for first-year students in STEM: Making the transition to college through coding and robotics

Abstract

This Complete Evidence-Based Practice paper presents the Summer Engineering Academy at the University of the Incarnate Word (UIW). The camp was designed for first-year freshman and transfer students with a declared Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) major. The main goal of the program was to support and encourage the incoming freshmen's transition into pursuing science, math and engineering degrees at the UIW. In order to achieve this goal, the objectives of the camp were (1) To address students' academic readiness and self-efficacy for a rigorous STEM degree; (2) To strengthen incoming freshman students' skills in communication, effective collaboration, and data analytics through coding and hands-on robotics activities. The Summer Engineering Academy was a free one-week camp that provided service to a low-to-moderate income student population in STEM major. The camp participants were from diverse STEM fields that included engineering, biochemistry, nuclear medicine science, biology, computer information systems, meteorology, 3-D animation & game design. We observed that upon completion of the camp, the participants were motivated and excited about starting their first year at the University of the Incarnate Word, had an understanding of the career options in their STEM fields, and achieved a basic understanding in computer programming and engineering design. In this paper, we describe the details about the Summer Engineering Academy based on the teaching materials, the results of students' evaluations, lessons learned and the future work.