The purpose of this note is to summarize and share with the wider academic and non-academic communities our experience over five years, 2014-2018, running the Simon Fraser University Academic Summer Camp for Aboriginal High School Students. In what follows we describe our reasons for developing this outreach activity and provide the goals and…

In response to the need to broaden participation in computer science, we designed a summer camp to teach middle-school-aged youth to code apps with MIT App Inventor. For the past four summers, we have observed significant gains in youth's interest and self-efficacy in computer science, after attending our camps. The majority of these youth,…

This study examines science interests, efficacy, attitudes, and identity--referred to as affinities, in the context of an informal science outreach program for girls. A mixed methods design was used to explore girls' science affinities before, during, and after participation in a cohort-based summer science camp. Multivariate analysis of survey…

The District of Columbia's Nature Computer Camp program, described and evaluated in this paper, was designed to reduce the geographical isolation of economically disadvantaged urban sixth graders, and to provide them with increased knowledge of the environmental and computer sciences. The paper begins by giving details of the program's management,…