University Outreach Center's Summer Science Camps

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The University of Texas at Austin conducts three series of Summer Science Camps annually for 150 African-American and Hispanic youths entering the eighth and ninth grades. Designed to build a coherent and solid foundation among minority middle schoolers for an interest in and understanding of science and mathematics, these programs are presented in the context of existing Outreach Centers established by the University in major concentrations of target minorities in Austin, Dallas, and the Rio Grande Valley. The SSC environment and activities are designed to bring the participant into immediate and personal contact with the people and "things" of science, mathematics and technology by having them participate in a wide range of research processes and interacting with active mathematicians, engineers and scientists. The focus of each of the SSC's curricula is embodied in a major yearly theme for each site that is derived from the particular nature of local student populations and the available resources of that area (e.g. basic foundations, robotics and space technology, ecology/plant/animal study, and agribusiness and genetic engineering, etc.). SSC student participants will interact with teachers trained in teacher enhancement programs, thus matching the middle schoolers with trained science and mathematics teachers that they will likely encounter in upper middle and high school. The ultimate designed outcome of this interaction is the creation of "student-teacher allies" in the academic-year classroom who are bound together by both shared interest and common experience in the science and mathematics learning process.