High school students welcomed to Trine for engineering, computing camps

Two new camps at Trine University, hosted by the Allen School of Engineering and Computing, allowed high school students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in engineering and computing fields.

The Tech Titans and Engineer Your Future camps ran from Monday, July 22, to Wednesday, July 24, with campers staying overnight on campus and eating in the Whitney Commons Cafe.

Eleven students attended each camp. Students did not have to pay for the camps thanks to Lilly Endowment grant funding.

The camps arose out of discussions between William Barry, Ph.D., dean of the Allen School of Engineering and Computing, Gary Greene, Ph.D., chair of the Reiners Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Wendy Yagodinski, chair of the department of Computer Science and Information Technology (CSIT).

“Bill, Wendy and I wanted to create an event for high school students to introduce them to the variety of engineering and computing majors at Trine University,” said Greene. “Many high school students have limited exposure to different fields of engineering, and by giving them hands-on activities they could see which fields interested them the most.”

Hands-on activities

The Engineer Your Future camp, supervised by Greene, gave students the opportunity to take part in hands-on activities exposing them to electrical, civil, mechanical, chemical, biomedical and aerospace engineering as well as design engineering technology.

Activities included building an electronic cicada and a circuit to perform voice analysis; designing, building and operating a water conveyance system; designing, building and testing a wooden column; developing a separation process; making ice cream and chocolate; and fabricating a prosthetic hand from 3D printed parts.

Yagodinski oversaw the Tech Titans campers as they learned about embedded computers and extended reality through activities with equipment at Trine. They also were taught how to build PCs and learned Python programming and game design.

Coming together

Students from both camps joined together for several activities.

They enjoyed a session by Nathan Pitchaikani, a Senior Security Engineer at Riot Games, who told them what it takes to make it into the game design industry and how to engineer their luck to get offers from big game companies.

Students attended a session on AI image recognition and AI Genetic Algorithms. During the AI image recognition session, students were shown how to train image recognition and were introduced to the thinking machine so they could do their own image recognition. In the AI Genetic Algorithm class, Trine software engineering student Myron Lafty taught campers how to code a genetic algorithm in Python.

Students from both camps participated in a Smash Bros tournament, ice skating and a showing of the movie Ready Player One in Fabiani Theatre. They also got to design and fly their own rockets.

The camps finished with a campus-wide capture the flag tournament, where students had to solve escape-room-like challenges to progress through different stops and finish with a computer hacking challenge. Trine computer science and information technology (CSIT) alumnus Bryan Sears, a security engineer at Shorepoint, spoke to the students about cybersecurity and was available for expert hints along the way.

Top students in several of the challenges from both camps were recognized at an awards ceremony.

Tech Titans campers left with flash drives containing all the materials from the camp, mini 3D-printed computers, Mr. Beast Bars, CSIT key chains and information on Trine’s CSIT program.

Back next year

Greene said the university is already planning to repeat the camps next summer.

“I think that when students have a great time at the camp and at Trine, it will increase their interest in choosing engineering as their career and show them that their dream can become a reality at Trine University,” he said.

Yagodinski said she would like to see the Tech Titans camp run longer next year and include more guest speakers and a campus tour.

“My goal was to inspire students to want to pursue a degree in one of the computer science, AI, cybersecurity, extended reality, programming, etc. fields. I would love it if this camp inspired them to come to Trine University,” she said. “The students all had a great time, and I really think they are considering computing careers as a possibility!”