Every summer brings a new wave of middle school and high school students to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, where staff members eagerly await to connect them to the world of supercomputing. In line with its dedication to nurturing the next generation of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) leaders, Argonne hosted three summer camps this year that spotlight coding and computational science. 

"Argonne's summer computing camps offer Chicagoland students amazing hands-on learning experiences with the support of Argonne staff. Students not only learn more about coding, from foundational computational thinking to neural networks, but have conversations with scientists and engineers who have careers in these fields," says Paige Kinsley, education outreach lead at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). "The camp content is only bolstered by tours of the Argonne facilities, transforming the theoretical concepts they are learning about into reality."

Because the camps are centered around coding, the ALCF, a DOE Office of Science user facility, plays a key role in developing the curricula in collaboration with the lab's Educational Programs and Outreach team. ALCF staff members use their expertise to teach coding lessons and lead facility tours that give students a firsthand look at the lab’s supercomputers.

Directed at the earliest level of students, the CodeGirls camp highlights the essential role that women have played throughout history in technology development. This five-day program serves as a first step for sixth- and seventh-grade girls who are interested in learning coding with no prior experience or knowledge necessary. The camp also invites lab researchers to talk to the students and share how they turned their coding interests into careers. The girls in the camp build friendships as they work together to solve coding-related challenges.

Similar to CodeGirls, Argonne’s annual Big Data Camp gives students an opportunity to connect with each other and with the lab’s computer science experts. The five-day summer camp gives students tools to work with large, real-world data sets, helping them learn firsthand what it’s like to be a data scientist. The experience is led by scientists from ALCF and enables students to visualize data and realize unexpected and remarkable relationships within the data.

As part of the camp this year, ALCF staff members introduced the high school students to AI for science through hands-on activities that taught them how neural networks and classification models are used for data analysis. They also spent time in the ALCF’s Visualization Lab where the students get an overview of scientific visualizations and learn how researchers use them to gain insights into the massive datasets generated by supercomputer simulations.

“The Big Data Camp team is constantly looking for ways to innovate and create an experience that is engaging and relevant,” says John Domyancich, lead of Educational Programs and Outreach’s Learning Center at Argonne. “This year we added activities on AI, including training and testing machine learning models and building a “human neural network” where the students worked as a group to predict the content of images. By connecting these experiences to the research and capabilities at ALCF, we hope to open a pathway to Argonne for these students.”

Another one of Argonne’s summer camps aimed at high schoolers is the Coding for Science Camp, featuring programming activities that link computational science with current scientific challenges.

Over the course of the week-long camp, the students enhance their problem-solving and teamwork skills through hands-on activities, while discovering how computing is useful and often essential to solving problems in science. Similar to the previous camps, they also get an opportunity to interact with Argonne staff members to explore the diverse career pathways that need coding skills.

The Argonne summer camps continue to be a key element of the lab’s ability to connect with and inspire the next generation of researchers.

"Students in these camps are able to learn about the staff’s career paths and personal journeys in computational science,” says ALCF computer scientist Huihuo Zheng, who was involved in this year’s Big Data Camp. “Our hope is to not just simply teach key concepts to those who are interested in computer science, but to inspire them to pursue careers of their own, as we show them that it is tangible."