Engineering Summer Camp for Minority Kids Offers Them a Valuable Indoor Experience

摘要

Despite the draw of a new baseball team and other summertime pursuits in Washington, D.C., hundreds of mostly African-American elementary and middle school kids there will spend three weeks next month at a school-based day camp doing what engineers and other science professionals do. The success of last year's camp, based on the length of its waiting list, indicates that the 2008 expanded program is proving a worthy contender for students' time and interest. The Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (SEEK) program was begun last summer by the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) to provide a hands-on showcase of science, technology, engineering and math to students as young as third grade. "We had to go deeper into the K-12 pipeline," says Carl B. Mack, NSBE executive director. "Trends showed that students were turned off to STEM fields by middle school."