2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As the demand for engineers continues to expand and new challenges emerge, the need for a diverse engineering workforce has become increasingly urgent. Greater diversity within the engineering field can enable new perspectives and creative approaches to solving entrenched problems. However, persistent inequities in access to high-quality STEM education and early exposure to engineering mean that many young people, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds, remain disconnected from these opportunities.
One strategy for expanding participation in the field has been through engineering summer camps targeted at youth with nascent STEM experience. These short-term, immersive experiences have the potential to transform students’ attitudes toward engineering and improve their interest in this field. Over the past decade, such offerings have proliferated across the United States (e.g., Cohodes, Ho, & Robles, 2022; Qasrawi, 2023). While these programs are often designed to transform students’ attitudes toward engineering and increase their interest in the field, few systematically measure the extent to which they influence awareness, identity, or agency along the pathway to engineering.
This study addresses that gap by examining whether participation in a focused, short-term engineering camp can shape students’ perceptions of engineering and provide meaningful, positive exposure to the field. Starting in 2021, the General Electric (GE) Aerospace Foundation launched the Next Engineers Engineering Camp, designed to introduce 8th and 9th grade students to the engineering design process, increase awareness of engineering as a potential career, and provide focused exposure to aerospace engineering. Camp participants completed design challenges inspired by real-world scenarios, interacted with professional engineers, and participated in college and career readiness workshops.
The research employed a pre/post-camp survey design, analyzing quantitative data from over 300 participants who attended engineering camp between 2022 to 2024. The analysis focused on five constructs identified as critical to engineering persistence: awareness (knowledge of the field), interest, identity (seeing oneself as an engineer), mindset (creative and problem-solving disposition), and agency (self-efficacy and intentional planning).The engineering survey was developed by the Next Engineers research team, piloted across camp cohorts in the US, UK and South Africa.
Findings demonstrate that NE Camps consistently improved students’ attitudes toward the engineering field across these five dimensions. Participants reported increased knowledge of and interest in engineering after attending the one-week engineering summer camp. The paper discusses implications for the development of future engineering summer camps, including the importance of ongoing mentorship and structured design challenges to enhance engineering identity and agency. These results contribute to understanding the impact of short-term, experiential programs on students’ cognitive and affective learning outcomes and on efforts to build a more diverse and engaged engineering pipeline.