Second Annual Robotics Summer Camp for Underrepresented Students

The University of Minnesota Center for Distributed Robotics and the Digital Technology Center hosted the second annual Technology Day Camp, a week long camp targeting underrepresented students such as girls, African Americans, and Hispanics from the Twin Cities metro area. Students were surveyed prior to the camp revealing a strong proclivity towards math and science, but a resistance to the perceived lifestyle of computer scientists. With an emphasis on the college experience, building hardware, creating software, and interacting with robots, the camp implemented proposed changes from the previous year as well as new activities with a special emphasis on robotics. The successes and failures are discussed in an effort to provide insight for organizations hosting similar programs, new research questions are presented, and a materials list is provided.