Working with a classmate, her mission was to give a small robot a fun personality and code it it to lead people through games that include charades and truth or dare.
"It's fun learning about all the different robots and coding," she said. "It's a lot of problem-solving. We have to code all the different rounds of the games and the audience participation. It's a lot, but we've got it."
For the seventh year, the Innovation Center teamed up with the University of Colorado Boulder and the Northrop Grumman Corp. to offer a week of STEM camps for middle and high school students. About 110 students participated. The classes were designed and taught by Innovation Center student designers, teachers and Northrop Grumman volunteers.
The week originally started with a focus on cybersecurity for about 30 students who wanted to learn more advanced concepts. It has expanded to include topics like AI, computer science and career exploration.
"I love how this camp has grown," said administrator Chris Schmitz, who teaches STEM class at Erie High during the school year. "I'm excited to see where its going to go."
Along with attending classes at the Innovation Center, students spend a day at CU Boulder for a campus tour, STEM programs visit and meet up with graduate students. Friday, students will show their families what they learned and hear from keynote speaker Calvin Pennamon, a Northrop Grumman director.
Other speakers for the week included a panel of St. Vrain Valley graduates now attending CU and a speaker from the National Security Administration who demonstrated how a World War II Enigma decoding machine works. Wednesday's session started with a panel of three Northrop Grumman employees plus an intern from CU Boulder.
The panel addressed questions that included their favorite video games, fun learning experiences they had in college and what advice they would go back and give their 12-year-old selves.
Kenyon Reid, who tests software, said his advice is to maintain your curiosity.
"It's not about how smart you are, you will get that in time," he said. "It's not just figuring out something is broken. You want to ask why."
Alex Mason, a system administrator on the missile defense system, urged students to be flexible and talked to them about his non-traditional path. He didn't graduate from high school, instead earning a GED and going into the workforce. He then went to college, twice, to earn degrees. He also worked for YouTube personality MrBeast on a Minecraft server.
"It was a winding road," he said "That actually worked to my benefit."
Thea Banis initially earned a degree in psychology, then enlisted in the Army to work as a military psychologist. Deciding that wasn't a good fit, she earned a second degree in software development and is now an engineer at Northrop Grumman.
"Life has a funny way of putting you where you need to be," she said.
Scott Tompkins, a functional manager at Northrop Grumman who helped organize the camps, said the company sees the program as an extension of its work with community colleges. At the community college level, the company hires apprentices, mentors them and then hires the best after they earn an associate's degree — and pays for their continued education.
"We want to reach them when they're even younger and get them on track," he said. "We want to give them every chance."
Organizers said a main goal is to find fun, accessible ways to teach complex topics.
"We want to expose students to some of the more advanced concepts and really get them excited about what they can learn in high school," Schmitz said.
In one class, students learned about AI through DeepRacer self-driving cars. They started by embedding artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning technologies into the 1/18th scale race car. Next, they "trained" the car to run on a virtual race track circuit before trying it on a physical track.
"AI is going to be big in the future," said Pravir Sachanandani, an incoming seventh grader at Altona Middle School.
Classmate Parker Rickett added that he's not great at Python coding, but was still able to understand how the cars work and program them.
"It's really fun," he said. "It teaches you a lot of things you can use in the future. You can see what you might want to dive in to when you're older."
Sam Popma, who will be a junior at Niwot High, helped teach the class after teaching himself how the DeepRacer cars worked.
"Teaching kids how to train AI models is awesome," he said. "They can show off something they made, they programmed. Seeing them as excited about AI as I was when I was their age, it's super cool."
Two classes other, taught through a partnership with CU Boulder's Institute of Student-AI Teaming, delved into how people relate to AI and how to use block coding to get microbit cars around a track and safely through obstacles.
Arati Kulkarni, an incoming eighth grader at Altona Middle School, said her group got the car to follow a line of tape around a track, stop at an obstacle and pop a wheelie. Next, they were working on getting it go around a traffic cone they made from a paper cup.
"I learned there are all different levels of autonomous," she said. "I learned about AI 'jail breaking' and how to make an app. It's better than I thought it would be."
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