For rising 10th-12th graders (& Teachers!)
July 23rd – July 29th, 2023 [IDEA] (Residential & Commuter)
Application deadline: Sunday, March 26, 2023
Cost:
Residential: $1,000 per camper. Scholarships are available.
Commuter & In-Person Day Camp: $600 per camper. Scholarships are available.
See the Summer Camps FAQs page for more information about camp costs and the Trail Blazer scholarship.
*IDEA camps are mission-driven camp sessions led by departments aiming to Increase Diversity, Equity, & Access in STEM majors and careers. These camps focus on support and empowerment of traditionally excluded populations in STEM including (but not limited to) the areas of gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and ability. The absence of their talents is a detriment to the STEM fields. IDEA camps provide a safe environment to build a community of peers and mentors who empower one another to be confident in their exploration of STEM. All are welcome to apply.
The Electrical Engineering camp for high school students explores the depth and breadth of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Campers learn how research in this discipline benefits society as a whole. The technical program includes classroom instruction, demonstrations, hands-on activities, tours, usage of research facilities, and four team projects. The curriculum showcases practical applications of ECE (circuits, signals, electromagnetics, power, nanotechnology, solid-state electronics, and photonics) by investigating a real-world technology – the cell phone. Projects include:
- Building an FM transmitter by laying out the parts of their circuit on a protoboard, determining their purpose, and then soldering together an FM phone that they take home with them.
- Using an online circuit simulator to learn about logic gates before building an LED calculator circuit that adds numbers as high as 3 plus 3 and displays the result with light.
- Working in a university cleanroom laboratory to make a solar cell and phototransistor
- Building an image projector out of folded paper that holds an LED flashlight, a 1” square transparency, and a lens.
This camp will include a teacher component, where high school teachers can apply and work alongside student campers to learn together. Teacher application will be listed separately when available.
From previous years:
Camp Coordinator:
Dr. Lynford Goddard received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford in 2005. He conducted postdoctoral research on photonic integrated circuits and sensors. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering faculty in 2007 and is currently a full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His group fabricates, tests, and models photonic sensors, circuits, and instrumentation; develops novel device processing techniques; and applies quantitative phase microscopy for semiconductor wafer metrology. He was an IEEE Photonics Journal Associate Editor (2009-2014) and currently serves on its Advisory Board. He received the Early Career Public Engagement Award in 2011 from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama in 2010. Dr. Goddard is a co-author of over 200 publications and 10 patents.
“I really enjoyed soldering, and it was used in many projects. I learned how to do it better and I used this new skill in making the FM transmitter, which worked, and on the LED calculator, that also worked. I also really enjoyed working on the LED calculator. I was able to finish it with minimal help from my fellow campers. I would not have been able to do it at the beginning of the camp, so it shows me that I did learn at this camp.” ~2019 Electrical & Computer Engineering camper
Camp Schedule(s):
- ECE IDEA camp schedule coming soon. Please view this schedule of a previous camp with similar content.
