2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI) is a pre-college summer program funded annually by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), hosted by universities, and managed by the Department of Transportation (DOT) of each state. The purpose of the NSTI program is to promote the interests of minority and underrepresented rising high school students in transportation related career and college degrees. In summer 2024, the Engineering Technology department at Middle Tennessee State University hosted our first ever NSTI program, which was 4-week long and non-residential. The program offered several field trips to various places and a curriculum consisted of three components: (i) Arduino programming and robotics challenges; (ii) computer vision and drones; (iii) traffic simulation using Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO). During the closing ceremony, the participants of the NSTI program presented what they had learned in front of the parents/guardians and the representatives from the civil rights division of our state’s DOT. We conducted surveys among the participants before and after the program. The presentations and the survey results indicate that our NSTI program has greatly promoted the participants’ interests in STEM and transportation related career.

This paper details the organization and execution of the NSTI program, including planning, participants recruiting, curriculum design, daily activities, field trips, presentations, and results of the robotic challenges. We also present the survey results and tips and lessons learned. We believe that this paper will be beneficial for the universities that wish to host the NSTI or any other similar pre-college summer programs.