Mobile Invention Camps Challenge The Dalles’ Youth

Precollege Program’s “Mobile Invention Camps” Challenge The Dalles’ Youth

The Dalles had their first invention camp hosted by OSU. The camps are designed to challenge students to overcome obstacles and become better at critical thinking. The camps also offer a hands-on STEM experience to rural communities throughout Oregon. A lot of the activities done at these camps (duct tape wallets, solar powered cars, and chemical powered cars) are designed with failure in mind to help students better adjust to failure and find new pathways to success.

Another focus of these camps is to let OSU students interact with K-12 students and help them get an idea about what sort of options they have when approaching higher education. For a lot of K-12 students the camps are their first experience interacting with University representatives and it’s important that these interactions clear the air of any misconceptions the students may have about college.

Read the full story from The Dalles Chronicle

Mobile STEM Camps Reach Students in Boardman, Oregon.

The North Marrow Times Writes About Precollege Program’s Mobile STEM Camps

The North Marrow Times is the local newspaper for Boardman, Oregon. Boardman is a town about 250 miles away from Oregon State University’s campus. It’s located on the river that acts as a border between Washington and Oregon. From July 26th-27th OSU offered one of their Mobile STEM Camps through Procollege Programs, in Boardman.

The camp ran two days and was aimed towards 6th-8th graders. Activities included making solar powered cars, building earthquake proof structures, and making water purification filtration devices. The camp was ran by four OSU students who also were able to answer questions about what college life is like.

Mobile STEM Camps’ focus is to provide meaningful, hands-on, STEM experiences to underserved children and rural communities across Oregon. Being able to impact 22 students in a rural community like Boardman, Oregon is a wonderful example of the STEM camps working to achieve their goal.

The full article from The North Marrow Times can be found here on page 13

Precollege Programs Annual Update

This past year The Office of Precollege Programs at OSU was able to achieve its goals and make meaningful experiences for Oregon’s youth.

This year The Office of Precollege Programs offered 98 programs to Oregon’s youth which brought a total of 52,874 growth opportunities for Oregon’s youth. These programs engage students of all demographics in a large array of activities and subjects.

Along with the benefit to the K-12 students, Precollege Programs also provides valuable experience for OSU students, volunteers, teachers, and faculty across Oregon. Getting to interact with K-12 students in a way that will help shape them as students for the future doesn’t only look good on a resume but it feels good to be a part of.

A few highlights from this year are the Mobile STEM Camps and Campus Field Trips. Mobile STEM Camps is a program designed to bring STEM activities to student’s backyards. This program is crucial because there are a lot of rural communities in Oregon that don’t have access to STEM activities. Mobile STEM Camps allow OSU to engage with these rural communities and help their teachers and students interact in fun, engaging, and stimulating STEM focused activities.

One example of an activity commonly done at the camps is getting students to build solar powered cars made from K’nex. A group project like this introduces students to working in a group to achieve a real-world applicable goal. It also gives their teacher an opportunity to talk about renewable energy outside of a classroom setting.

This year, Mobile STEM Camps connected to 371 students in rural communities across Oregon. This was made possible with the help of 117 volunteers, OSU students, teachers, and parents or guardians.

The Office of Precollege Programs is very proud in the students we have here at OSU and their willingness and eagerness to help better the future for the rural communities and students of Oregon.

One of our other programs, Campus Field Trips, gives students and teachers the opportunity to come to OSU and tour the campus. During these tours they may tour campus, eat lunch in a dining hall, visit a cultural center or stop by an athletic facility, and have a presentation and participatory or hands-on activity presented by a faculty member, staff, or students meant to enhance school curriculum as well as expose students to potential majors or careers.

This year Campus Field Trips brought 9,801 students to OSU! This was done with only 41 OSU students working and giving tours to these kids.

As our programs continue to grow we look forward to working with new students and teachers across the state. The Office of Precollege Programs has a lot of programs for all types of students and we will continue to expand these programs to achieve our mission.

“Oregon State University’s Office of Precollege Programs (PCP) supports and oversees a wide range of youth outreach activities designed to increase the academic preparation of Oregon’s youth and prepare them for college. Programs ranging from summer science camps, to afterschool clubs, to research internships provide pathways to higher education and offer opportunities to enhance physical and mental well-being.”

‘Somebody who looks like me’: OSU workshop encourages, inspires middle-school girls to pursue science

[Discovering the Scientist Within], which dates back to the 1970s, was designed to nurture girls’ interest in the science through hands-on STEM activities and partnerships with female scientists. During the workshop, the girls broke off into groups and spread out all over the OSU campus to participate in a dozen activities, including extracting DNA from a strawberry, turning a penny gold, riding hovercrafts and imploding soda cans.

Read more at the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

College students serve as mentors to St. Helens high schoolers

For the second year at St. Helens High School, students in all grades can converse in real time with college students at Oregon State University about academic and social topics.

The program, called “Beaver Hangouts,” has been operating since 2012 and began as a community outreach initiative to introduce underserved students across Oregon to the idea of college in a more personal way. Read more at the South County Spotlight.

Lemelson Grant Awarded for Mobile Invention Camps

CORVALLIS, Ore. – This summer youth in rural Oregon will put their  creativity to work solving real life problems, thanks to a new partnership between Oregon State University and the Lemelson Foundation.

A Lemelson Foundation grant will allow the university to develop and launch Mobile Invention Camps for middle school and high school students. Participants will study problems relevant to the economy of their own community and use engineering principles to come up with solutions.

Hands-on activities will enable students to construct and test a prototype invention, with the goal of developing a product that could be commercialized.

Ultimately, the camps aim to motivate rural Oregon students to pursue higher education to gain the skills necessary to be effective inventors, entrepreneurs and agents of global change.

Mobile Invention Camps will be modeled on the successful Mobile Science and Engineering Camps that OSU has offered since 2009. Originally funded by the Engineering and Technology Industry Council, the camps use hands-on activities centered on sustainable energy to increase student confidence and interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).  Since inception the camps have served more than 1,000 rural, low-income and minority Oregon students.

The new program aims to create modular invention-based activities that can be adapted to middle and high school levels, thus broadening the camps’ impact. Curriculum will be co-developed with faculty and students from OSU’s humanitarian engineering program. This emerging field emphasizes science and engineering-based solutions that help to improve the human condition, increase access to basic human needs, enhance quality of life and strengthen community resilience.

“Mobile Invention Camps will be a great opportunity to engage rural students in a real-world, problem-solving experience that incorporates community assessment, environmental sustainability, creative invention design and prototyping and development of an entrepreneurial commercialization plan,” said Kyle Cole, OSU Director of Pre-College Programs. “It will also help inspire rural Oregon students to pursue higher education, especially in fields related to invention and entrepreneurship, and help them understand how to prepare and pay for college.”

Starting this July, six to eight week-long Mobile Invention Camps will take place in rural Oregon communities, engaging up to 30 students in each location.

Established by prolific U.S. inventor Jerome Lemelson and his wife, Dorothy, in 1992, and led by the Lemelson family, the Lemelson Foundation uses the power of invention to improve lives. It seeks to inspire and enable the next generation of inventors and invention-based enterprises to promote economic growth in the U.S., and social and economic progress for the poor in developing countries.