Tomorrow’s Technologists

Youth explore STEM as part of ECU camp

In a world where robots constructed from cardboard boxes battle for ultimate supremacy, Jordan Elliott surmised that his came out on top.

“They double-teamed me at the end, but I feel like I won though,” said Elliott, a rising sophomore at Bertie Early College High School in Windsor.

East Carolina University hosted Elliott and 61 other high school students in three one-week sessions as part of the STEM Mavericks youth camp. The final week of the camp featured military dependents from North Carolina, while two previous sessions included students from economically stressed Tier 1 counties in eastern North Carolina.

Students spent the week at ECU working on everything from electrical circuitry and coding to robotics. In one of the activities, students worked to get green, yellow and red lights to illuminate in sequence, similar to a traffic signal. The camp culminated in student presentations in which parents were invited to see what their children accomplished during the week.

Moving Forward

Saniyah Ayers works with a cobot during ECU’s STEM Mavericks youth camp in the high bay lab of the Science and Technology Building.

Saniyah Ayers took a handle of the controls and moved a robot right outside the door. She took careful aim and then fired a foam ring across a patio toward some trees.

“To drive the robot, it felt weird, but also fun to be able to control it,” she said.

Ayers, a military dependent, said she enjoyed the camp.

“It makes me think more about my school options, and it makes me wonder more about STEM,” she said. “I was thinking about more of the engineering and math side, but I haven’t thought about it too much. I used to be in a computer programming class at school and I was able to code, but I haven’t done that since I left that class.”

At age 14, Ayers is already thinking about her future in college, with the camp giving her a feel of what college campuses are like.

“I’ve been thinking about it since I was 12,” she said. “I wanted to go to Harvard or Yale, but I thought about it and I’m thinking about more options now.”

Thinking of the Future

With roughly 3,200 residents, Tyrrell County in northeastern North Carolina is the least-populated county in the state. Joslyn Voliva, a sophomore, attends the county’s only high school, Columbia.

She said attending the camp made her think about attending ECU, though she’s not sure of a career path yet.

“I’m into the medical field more than anything, but biomedical engineering might be cool,” she said.

Sebastian Perez-Hernandez, center, Joslyn Voliva, left, and another STEM Mavericks camper work on an electrical circuits activity.

Voliva said she enjoyed the camp.

“It was pretty good,” she said. “I personally liked the electrical wiring. I’m not much on the coding. I struggle with that.”

Sebastian Perez-Hernandez, a senior at Nash-Rocky Mount Early College, said he enjoyed the camp’s activities, such as setting up a device to receive radio signals.

“By the first and second day, we were already doing hands-on stuff with wiring. It was pretty cool,” he said. “I had never gotten that experience before. It was fun to see what potentially could be my job later on down the road.”

He said he wants a job working on computers.

“Ultimately my goal is to get a computer engineering degree, and from there, tinker with computers and build them,” he said. “I like the hardware and the process of making a computer.”

Perez-Hernandez said he also enjoyed getting to experience campus life.

“Dorm life was pretty good. It was a pretty fun experience for the first time,” he said. “We got to feel that college experience, and that was a pretty good thing.”

Ethan Keel, a junior at Riverside High School in Williamston, said he enjoyed how the camp allowed the students to experiment on their own.

“I loved it. It was a great experience,” he said. “I enjoyed the flexibility. We got a base set of rules, but we were able to move away from that within reason.”

On a Mission

ECU’s Department of Technology Systems in the College of Engineering and Technology hosted the camp with support from Trenchant Analytics and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) in the Department of Defense (DoD).

Jordan Elliott, right, and other students in the STEM Mavericks camp operate robots made of cardboard boxes in the high bay lab of the Science and Technology Building.

“One of the missions we have is to expose young adults from underrepresented demographics to current technologies that are being used by the Department of Defense and to make them aware of opportunities within DoD to serve as a defense civilian employee,” said Clay James, digital futures program advisor to the CDAO. “… The goal is to give them the confidence that, ‘I can do this. This is not something that I can’t do.’ And if they have a desire to do this, we want to foster that desire and help them achieve their goals.”

Dr. Ciprian Popoviciu, assistant professor, senior teaching instructor Steve Baker, teaching assistant professor Josh Pitzer, guest lecturer Colby Sawyer and graduate student Kamron Hopkins served as instructors of the camp. Popoviciu said camp supporters were happy to help teach the next generation of technologists in support of the CDAO.

“It’s nice to help their mission,” Popoviciu said. “Our mission is to help train these students, encourage them to come to ECU when they graduate high school and to spread access (to STEM) throughout North Carolina.”

Leon Malisov, developer relations lead for Trenchant Analytics, said the company believes in the importance of exposing students to STEM to jumpstart their careers in technology. He believes the camp at ECU is a perfect way to do that.

“I grew up with similar backgrounds to some of these Tier 1 kids, and boy, I really wish I had a program like this when I was their age because I would not think that I was capable of this, of any of this, unless somebody or some program like this pushed me to believe in myself the way that you guys are doing here,” Malisov said.