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The summer sun streams through windows of a U-M lab as 10 ninth-grade girls program small robots to move along black lines on a white background.
They do it by programming light and dark sensors. “You can also set the speed you want your robot to go,” says Azari Hassan of Augusta Township, working in tandem with Raquel Goosey of Andover, Mass.
To get their robots to move, campers type programming commands onto computer screens in the Undergraduate Sciences Building, which houses the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program offices.
The camp is one of many presented at U-M every summer with the goal of exposing young people to college to help them see higher education as part of their futures.
In addition, the camps serve as one form of pipeline activity to encourage underrepresented minorities and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to realize that they can aspire to become U-M students.
Academic summer programs have grown from a handful in the late 1980s to roughly 100 today, says John Matlock, associate vice-provost and director of the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives.
“The University benefits from having a mix of students on campus, and participating faculty and staff strengthen their personal commitment to K-12 education,” he says. “As an institution we do have an obligation to expose young people to higher education activities and to play a role in inspiring them to do their very best as they prepare for college.”
Cinda-Sue Davis, program director of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), says while girls are traditionally underrepresented in those fields, they find camaraderie in a camp made up of other girls who share their interests. “There are a lot of group projects and a lot of laughs,” she says. “They make a lot of friends who are interested in the things they’re interested in.”
The program demystifies college for our participants, says Debbie Taylor, director of the Women in Engineering office. “The students who participate leave the campus realizing that in a few years they, too, can be sitting in a classroom on North Campus or conducting experiments in the chemistry building.”
The robots program is in a pilot year; organizers hope to have capacity for 25 next year and will expand it from there, says Jamie Saville, WISE assistant director.
This year overall, WISE enrolled 119 campers, up from 100 last year, in one example of growing summer camp participation around the University.
Summer camp programs around campus range from Camp CAEN, a summer commuter and residential program offered by the College of Engineering for middle and high school students that examines 3-D modeling and virtual reality, to the Michigan Math & Science Scholars Program and the GENESIS High School Summer Research Apprentice Program, which includes students from racial and ethnic populations that are underrepresented in nursing.
“We try to develop relationships with principals, parents or teachers at particular schools. They get to know our programs and then they really work to get talented students into our programs,” Saville says.
The University tries to keep camp affordable and offers scholarships, Saville says.
“We’re particularly interested in historically under represented minorities, mainly girls, and first-generation college students,” Davis says. “We’re interested in rural and urban and suburban students; we want as diverse a group as possible.”
Matlock offers evidence that the summer camps draw students to attend U-M: “Every orientation I see students I’ve been working with (in camps) and other pre-college programs since they were in the sixth grade. By that time, they know the campus very well, they know faculty and staff and know the very high expectations that U-M has for all students.”
Col. Jan Malaikal, chair of U-M’s ROTC Army Officer Education Program, helps oversee the Senior ROTC program that, along with the Office of Admissions, is hosting the Detroit Public Schools Junior ROTC Curriculum Advance Studies Staff School this summer. Roughly 200 students from Michigan high schools in the Detroit metro area and Grand Rapids participate in this camp. “The cadets are learning to perform their leadership duties for the upcoming school year while gaining exposure to life on a college campus,” she says.
On his first day at the ROTC camp, Joshua Fletcher, 16, of Wayne says, “All the students I see are busy — I kind of like it. I want to join the ROTC program here, it’s a really good battalion.”
Also attending the Junior ROTC camp is Brieann Rice, 17, a battalion commander at Wayne Memorial High School. Rice says she plans to attend a community college nursing program for two years before completing her nursing degree at U-M.
The U-M student organization InnoWorks hosts a summer camp Aug. 18-22 focused on innovative science, technology, engineering and mathematics for middle-school students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This year the camp consists of 40 Ypsilanti middle school students engaging in activities including the use of oscilloscopes to measure sound, launching baking soda/vinegar rockets and building light-sensing robots out of Legos to navigate a maze.
For a list of pre-college summer programs available at U-M go to www.umich.edu/summer_prog.php#Anchor-child.
