Virtual Engineering Summer Camp in the age of COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic greatly affected the learning experience of students. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many engineering programs worldwide organized engineering summer camps for K-12 students in the summer of every year. These camps benefit K-12 students by providing a good insight into the introduction to engineering and also inducing intellectual curiosity in them through hands-on projects. Most of these sessions usually took place in a face to face setting versus the virtual mode of instruction. In summer 2020, the majority of the engineering summer camps were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The College of Engineering at the University of Texas Permian Basin organized the virtual engineering summer camp after shipping the required project kits to the students, thereby providing step-by-step instruction of performing the project virtually while also proving hands-on experience for better learning. To our knowledge, this mode of virtual summer camp that provided a hands-on experience to K-12 students was uniquely implemented in the nation by UTPB College of Engineering. This paper provides the ideas implemented to overcome several challenges, the techniques that rightly helped in conducting the virtual summer camp with hands-on experience, and methods to assess student learning.