Beaver Works Summer Institute

The Beaver Works Summer Institute is a transformational STEM experience, using project-based, workshop-style programs for rising high school seniors. We also work with public schools and teachers conducting STEM courses for their students.
Students in the Beaver Works Summer Institute practice steering their self-programmed robotic racecars, a challenge that included using the robots' sensors, programmed to detect a lane marking.
Students in the Beaver Works Summer Institute practice steering their self-programmed robotic racecars, a challenge that included using the robots' sensors, programmed to detect a lane marking.
High School (Grades 10, 11)
Course Online Component Summer
Autonomous RACECAR Grand Prix Yes 2020+
Cog*Works: Build Your Own Cognitive Assistant Yes 2020+
Build a Cubesat Yes 2020+
Autonomous Air Vehicle Racing Yes 2020+
Medlytics:Data Science for Health and Medicine Yes 2020+
Unmanned Air System--Synthetic Aperture Radar Yes 2020+
Hacking a 3D Printer Yes 2020+
Embedded Security and Hardware Hacking Yes 2020+
Remote Sensing for Disaster Response Yes 2020+
Serious Games Development with AI Yes 2020+
Reverse Engineering Software: Cybersecurity Course Coming 2021
Designing Assistive Technologies Yes 2021

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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The BWSI website listed below has the timelines and events for the current year. We are working to create new courses and content all the time. We strive to create a diverse and gender-balanced educational program for students both locally and across the nation. Our program is free thanks to many generous donors.

Our online courses provide fundamentals in Python, ROS (Robot Operating System), and specific technologies that provide depth for particular courses. The summer institute goes much deeper and encourages students to develop their learning with competitions and challenges building to a final team project.

For teachers and other nonprofit organizations, we will share our curriculum that can be used to help students prepare for college and beyond. We will help others create similar programs and are working to build a network of schools that will collectively improve engineering education worldwide. For information on Beaver Works Summer Institute, please email [email protected].

Imagine working on projects where you create applications that understand your voice, create a flu forecast by understanding disease propagation, read hand gestures, or look for cyberbullying in tweets; these are actual projects BWSI teams have built with programming, machine learning, and hard work.

Autonomous vehicles, whether car, drone, or underwater robot, are in high demand for people that know how to create them, understand sensors, and handle lots of data ─ fast! In RACECAR, teams will program a modified RC car that can go up to 40 mph to navigate a track. Your programing may win the race in a Grand Prix−style race competing with more than a dozen teams, including international teams. Autonomous drones add a third dimension to the controls, and marine drones have to work in very challenging environments for data collection in the ocean. Working in the ocean is hard, but space is still the final frontier. At BWSI, teams can learn the fundamentals of small satellite design, pick a science mission, match the sensors, and build a prototype. Your design data may go into a future MIT & NASA small satellite!

Data science is becoming fundamentally one of the most important sciences to learn, whether it is processing complex radar returns or looking for abnormal heart rhythms. The basics of AI, like machine learning, need data to work, and you can train neural networks with your BWSI team to do just about anything. As we continue to work using software and networks, it is very important to have robust and resilient systems and our courses in cyber technology ─ one in hardware and one in software ─ are increasingly important.

Air, land, sea, space, cyber, and most importantly, human projects are all available in BWSI. Pick a project and challenge yourself to be transformed at BWSI.

Beaver Works Website