Integrating Programming and Engineering Concepts using Raspberry Pi and Scratch

This Innovative Practice Full Paper introduces the design, organization, and assessment of a one-week summer camp geared towards integrating programming and engineering concepts using Raspberry Pi and Scratch for incoming 8th-grade female students to increase their interest and knowledge of Computing and Engineering. The purpose of offering this camp is to increase female participation in the computing and engineering fields to close the gender gap. This summer camp focused its efforts on teaching incoming 8
^th
-grade female students the fundamentals of programming skills and engineering concepts. We taught our camp participants to use Raspberry Pi to build systems that explore fundamental programming and engineering concepts and develop engineering skills. Raspberry Pi provides a general programming environment with numerous interfaces to allow direct control of the hardware. This paper describes the organization, coordination, and core curriculum instructions that integrate programming and engineering concepts taught in each hands-on session and discusses the program assessment results. Our program assessment results showed that all camp participant cohorts increased their knowledge and interests in computing and engineering. This paper intends to provide all the information needed to host similar summer camps at other institutions, and further prompt the effort to increase female participation in computing and engineering fields.