Introducing Engineering and Programming Concepts to Middle School and High School Students using SparkFun Inventor’s Kit, Scratch, and Java

This innovative Practice Full Paper establishes two one-week summer camps to introduce fundamental engineering and programming concepts to middle-school and high-school students using the SparkFun Inventor’s Kit, Scratch, Makers Empire 3D Design Software, and Java. The SparkFun Inventor’s Kit is a great way to introduce electronics and programming concepts to students who have little, no previous programming, or circuit construction experience. During the one-week summer camp, students were introduced to the Arduino-based SparkFun Inventor’s Kit as the hardware platform, along with Arduino’s Integrated Design Environment (IDE) for programming. Scratch was used to teach fundamental programming concepts such as arithmetic operations, strings, conditional statements, and loops. The motivation of our program is to offer hands-on engineering and programming experiences for middle-school and high-school students to increase their interests and knowledge in engineering and computing to promote student participation to meet the growing demand. Our program is unique in several ways: First, we developed several hands-on projects to integrate topics related to engineering and computing to help students develop and build skills of critical thinking, problem-solving, and invention. Second, we used several teaching tools, e.g., SparkFun Inventor’s Kit, Scratch, Makers Empire 3D Design Software, and Java to enrich students’ learning experience, while other programs used only one of those teaching tools. Third, we adopted several strategies to enrich our program, such as social encouragement, academic exposure, career perception, and social learning, which have shown beneficial effects on student learning in the literature to improve learning outcomes. Fourth, we also provided students the opportunity of a campus tour to help students get familiar with college life. Fifth, we organized team-building activities outside the classroom to build skills of effective collaboration and communication. Participants obtained a better understanding of principle programming, engineering concepts, and confidence in engineering and computing. The assessment results showed a significant increase in knowledge and interest in engineering and computing. This paper introduces the detailed information about our program organization, coordination, core curriculum design, and program assessment for organizing similar summer camps at other institutions and further prompts the effort to increase participation in engineering and computing fields.