Argonne’s summer camps help students recognize that computational thinking serves as an essential 21st-century skillset for enriching their STEM capabilities and creating new opportunities for professional science careers.
High School Coding Camp students celebrate their robot completing the maze course.
At Argonne, we help students construct pathways that build up their STEM skills in diverse directions, one of which being computational thinking, an important skill to master in the 21st century. By reaching out to students on different steps of the journey with free and engaging camp programs, we can help make their paths a pipeline to success:
CodeGirls (June 25-27) – CodeGirls creates new opportunities for current 6th and 7th-grade students (for the 2018-2019 school year) interested in STEM by providing a supportive environment to be introduced to the concept of coding. Our attentive staff, combined with easy-to-learn activities, will help our CodeGirls see the beauty of coding for the very first time and provide positive role models for their bright futures.
Creative Approaches to Problems in Science (CAPS) High School Computing Workshop (July 15-19) – At CAPS, experts from the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) teach high school students more about essential coding skills and why they matter so much in STEM and in the world. Not only will you come out better-equipped for programming in Python, but you will also realize how you can apply your coding knowledge to real-world science problems.
Big Data and Visualization Camp (July 22-26) – Bridging the gap between high school and higher ed, Big Data Camp offers participants an intense and immersive challenge in coding and data science. Students use data from Argonne’s Array of Things (AoT) project to experiment firsthand with investigative research, learning what it takes to be a data scientist. That way, they can walk into their academic and professional futures knowing how to see key patterns in the world.
Weather and Computing Workshop (August 5-9) - The world around us is increasingly being represented through data. The weather is no exception. Understanding and predicting the weather through data requires a 21st Century skill, computational thinking. At this workshop, middle school students explore this unique way of solving scientific problems. By working with computer models, throwing themselves into simulated weather events and wrestling with mounds of data, students develop their computational thinking skills.
Coding, science, and society all intersect in critical ways throughout the real world, and it’s vital to foster computational thinking skills in the next generation of scientists. That’s why we help build interest and confidence in those talents at a young age and then guide students further and further forward in their STEM and coding exploration, as part of our mission to generate new pathways for scientific learning and advancement.