Description of the video:
The campers can do things that range from building things with arduinos to
building web servers to learning about virtualization to learning about
artificial intelligence. So, there are a lot of opportunities to learn some
skills maybe understand some things about technology didn't know before they came here.
Well, we have educational lesson plans and then we have more
hands-on fun lesson plans and then we eat and we have games. So, it's a little
bit of everything but lots of learning.
Students come in at all different levels. Some have been to camp before and we've tried to provide opportunities for those,
but we we don't assume that. So, we start with the basics. So, if you don't know how to program, we help you learn how to program.
Everything here was new to me.
I'm like a novice at coding and stuff like that so I'm not really like understanding
everything. But like the fact that they accommodate to people like me and people
that are like more advanced than me, I feel like I'm really actually fitting in here.
I found it's been such a great like kind of exploration into this whole world of technology.
I can see so many different facets of hardware and software and cloud computing and servers and so on
and so forth. And the fact that I can really get an introduction and kind of
learn what each concept is, really kind of opens doors for me.
They can get that inspirational spark regardless of where they come in.
A lot of the stuff I already kind of knew, but coming here it's kind of opened it or broadened my perspective with it.
Every person has a different story. They all have different experience, interests
and things that they're skilled at that they might not even realize.
So, we have this core set of things that we teach in the first couple
of days at camp really so that you can do these other things that we call
tracks which are optional. So, those are where the camper makes a decision.
So, they they make a decision to go and learn more about fabrication. They make a
decision to go learn more about, say, embedded programming or web design or
graphic design - things like that.
They are creating circuits. They are typing up code.
They are creating it with their very own hands and that gives them the
chance to actually create instead of watch.
So, I think one of my favorite things is actually in the very first day we did the
Markov code A.I. So kind of as part of the advanced programming lesson, we went down
and we worked with I believe the graduate student on a Markov code A.I. program.
I am interested in pursuing cyber security so we ended up going down
to the server room in one of the sessions which was really neat for me.
I like the group project things like how we were doing things together where we
were more in a group than rather than us just doing something individually.
We were pretty much able to create like games with terrain like build our own
character pretty much going through a first-person game that we created
ourselves so that was pretty cool.
More than just the technology, right, they're meeting our students who are our counselors. They're living in our
residence halls. They're going to our dining halls.They're interacting
with others in the building. They talk to faculty members who come in and give talks.
Students are able to hear about what it's like to be in technology,
what it's like to be just a college student,
what it's like to be at a Big Ten University, and the most important thing is fit and you don't know if
something is going to fit or not until you get that kind of information and get
that kind of first-hand knowledge that they're getting with counselors here.
Our goal is to have some fun, to learn enough about technology to set that seed or, you
know, to give them that spark to have the interest enough to take the next step
and I think that's really where we're trying to make a difference.
I attended SICE camp I believe two years. This camp definitely influenced my decision to
come to informatics. I already knew I wanted to come to IU, but it helped
strengthen my confidence in that choice.
I went through the camp before my junior year of high school. It was actually the first time that I ever used Unity
was being taught at this camp so it's kind of come full circle.
You know, I learned it here and now I'm teaching other kids and hopefully I can, you know,
inspire them a little bit like I was inspired.
We've opened up, hopefully, new doors and, if not, we've made doors bigger.
In middle school I took a class in HTML, but here I learned a lot more than I expected to learn.
I love the people! I have made like incredible friends that I honestly
think I'll be friends with for a long time.
It's kind of fun that I can meet these people from, you know, across the nation even from Indiana all the way up
to, you know, Texas and Oregon and meet them all and see them all here and we
kind of all have the similar bond of technology and that kind of brought us together.
If I didn't come here, I wouldn't know anything about coding.
I know basic things now. I feel like I can, you know, go home and actually practice
things now that I know what I'm doing.
It was an extremely fun thing to do and it's one of the things
that I would probably keep in my memory for a really long time.
