Ole Miss hosts annual STEM camp for middle schoolers

OXFORD — Throughout this week, the University of Mississippi has been running a “Discover Engineering” camp — featuring turbine-building and a nanoparticle lab — for middle schoolers.

Ole Miss has been hosting a middle school STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) camp each summer for around a decade. This year, the focus is on engineering.

“The goal for us is really helping students understand there are many, many disciplines within engineering, many different ways to use different kinds of science in engineering, and kind of get them excited about all those different opportunities,” said Wendy Pfrenger, Ole Miss’s director of pre-college programs.

The camp is put on in partnership with TRANE, the university’s energy services provider. TRANE also offers camp-tuition scholarships to campers who would not otherwise be able to attend. Rising seventh through ninth graders can attend the camp for $710 if they spend the week living on campus or for $400 if they commute.

The tuition covers only a small portion of the camp’s operational costs, Pfrenger added. The university heavily subsidizes the STEM camp.

While the camp and its activities change every year, there are some annual staples. There’s a concrete lab with an Ole Miss professor who’s researching new concrete formulae that could, for example, be used on Mars. There’s also typically a trip to a blast lab — “kids love anything with explosions,” Pfrenger said.

This year, campers are getting to build their very own wind turbines with help from a specialist TRANE hired and flew in for the purpose. He’s teaching the campers about the physics of wind movement.

Campers are also doing a lab on nanoparticles, as well as visiting the National Center for Physical Acoustics to learn about the research being done there. At the center, they get to step into an anechoic chamber to experience the absence of sound.

“Whether or not (the campers) decide engineering is for them, I hope they get a chance to challenge themselves and to keep at something, to persist in pursuing something that matters to them,” Pfenger said. “That's what this camp really offers, is the time to sit with a complicated problem and solve it with other people.”