Cyber and STEM Talent Camp builds students' confidence
Jul. 19—The eighth annual Decatur-Morgan County Minority Development Association's Cyber and STEM Talent Camp for rising sixth graders this week is helping students in math and science, but also aims to develop life skills.
The students lined up in the Austin Middle School cafeteria Wednesday to move to the robotics portion of their day.
"You guys have demonstrated self-awareness and self-regulation which will help you in life," said Datie Priest, a soft-skills coordinator with the camp. "I am very proud. Give your brains a kiss!"
Murphy Brown, executive director of DMCMDA, said a goal of the camp is to reduce students' anxiety about math and science.
"We want to bring kids together who, some of them, are having challenges with math and science," Brown said. "We want to bring them together to kind of take the edge off of math and science, to show them some of the fun sides of it. We're actually having some success in doing that."
The DMCMDA is a 30-year-old organization that provides services for minorities in the Decatur-Morgan County area focused on five pillars: education, jobs, health, justice and housing. The Cyber and STEM camp addresses the education pillar.
Math and science are not the only areas in which students get extra help.
"This is a very unique camp. It's a camp that's designed to help students in Decatur City Schools become college and career-ready, whether they go to college when they finish high school or they go and be a part of the workforce," said Yvette Sanderson, a curriculum coordinator for the camp.
Brown said the students learn important interpersonal skills like handshakes and speaking in clear sentences with good eye contact.
"It's a career development and life-coaching camp," he said.
This year's camp kicked off Sunday with registration at the Cook Museum of Natural Science. Brown wanted the group to "hit the ground running" on Monday with team-building exercises. They want the counselors and coordinators to get to know the kids and the kids to know them.
On Tuesday and Thursday, the group visited Calhoun Community College.
"They have joined us the last couple of years. They've added a couple of components to enhance what we're trying to do," Brown said of Calhoun. "They've added advanced manufacturing," which includes soldering and exposure to machinery and programming.
Nucor loaned out a few employees and engineers to help with the camp this year. They worked with campers to build, program and race robots.
"We are volunteering as Nucor for this outreach program to try to teach these young minds about engineering, the engineering process — like the 'you're not going to get it right the first time' and it takes trial and error to complete a task," said Alaina Wiley, a level 2 process automation engineer for Nucor. She is a software developer for the company.
Nucor uses VEX Robotics classroom kits for this exercise. The students were given pieces and instructions to construct a forklift. The kits use Sketch, a building block-type programming language that serves as an introductory course in coding.
Wiley instructed the students on the best way to program their robots to navigate the course.
"As they code, we are going to encourage them to test as they go because that's the best way to code things in my opinion," she said. "Another part of engineering is finding out the best course of action. The only instructions they are given is they have to start in this box, collect as many objects as they can and put them into this box."
Sanderson hopes that working with the Nucor employees and focusing on tasks will help the students recognize opportunities that are available to them.
"We try to remove some of the stigma that surrounds STEM, so that they'll be more likely to choose those classes and to take the jobs — that for so many years have been out of reach for underrepresented minorities," she said. "So that's what we are doing here. Taking that mystery out of it."
Other companies and groups also met with the students, including from 3M, GE and the Chamber of Commerce.
"So we're really getting them acclimated to their future," Brown said. "We know it's early, but we think it's not too early to have these conversations."
The camp started eight years ago with 20 registered students. This year 50 students registered.
"On Friday, eight students that are from our very first camp are coming back to encourage these kids," Brown said. "They are on track to graduate this year. Those kids have been taking advanced classes and doing so well."
The camp is a good opportunity for the community and for marginalized students, Sanderson said.
"They need to have skills, and we teach them those skills early. So in our Cyber and STEM camp we kind of look for that talent in them that they might not know that they have yet," Sanderson said.
Murphy said the DMCMDA team is made up of physicists, educators and engineers.
"We want to go find that talent and plug them into it, so that they are able to ignite from it and move forward with it," Brown said. "We are doing that I think."