An Effective and Innovative Hands-On Approach for Teaching Introductive Concepts of Computer Programming, Electric Circuits, and Geiger Counter Topics for Middle and High School Students During a Short-Term Summer Camp

Abstract

This Full Innovative Paper describes an Effective Hands-On and Innovative Approach of teaching computer programming for middle and high school students during a three-day summer camp in 2024. It is known that teaching middle and high school students have been done in many summer camps by various universities. Many researchers believe that effective summer camps can improve the educational and career development outcomes of many students. Teachers and Administrators are increasingly promoting summer camp opportunities for introducing programming skills to middle and high school students. Students have been exposed to programming, problem solving, teamwork and technology application skills through the utilization of C++ and Python programming languages as well as robotics, such as designing and testing a miniOwl digital circuit and Geiger counter applications. In addition, another interesting topic taught was several applications using Geiger counter that detects the potassium 40 in the sodium free salt that people with high blood pressure sometimes substitute for regular salt. The second Geiger counter shows the number of counts per minute on the laptop\u27s screen. An Arduino counts the clicks from the Geiger counter for 15 seconds, multiplies the counts by 4 and displays the calculated counts per minute to the screen. A short C-program running on the Arduino platform controls the system. All these activities encouraged students to learn and think creatively, systematically, and work collaboratively, which represent skills needed in today\u27s workforce. Both C++ and Python sessions were designed to deliver basic programming concepts of these languages, coding practice projects of basic C++ and Python skills as well as simple real-life and data science examples. Once the students finished their coding activity, a discussion session followed to help students build ideas of how to use coding skills from the coding projects. The faculty conducted pre- and post-questionnaires about the summer camp to take into consideration students\u27 feedback for future similar events. Our conclusion is that students showed a better understanding of programming concepts and confidence in computing. We describe details about how we made the three-day summer camp to be effective and innovative using an interactive teaching approach. Our data assessment indicated a significant increase in knowledge and attrition toward learning computer programming and computing concepts. Our findings indicate that the summer camp activities proved to be beneficial to our students attending the event