Imagination Camp lets middle schoolers build their own handheld gaming system

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campus experience 1:24 Imagination Camp lets middle schoolers build their own handheld gaming system

By:

Lee Friesland

24 Jun 2025 306

Hosted by the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED), this year's Imagination Camp had participants build a gaming system from scratch called CroQuest. Student organization VT CRO designed the blueprint and helped the younger students navigate the finer details of soldering circuit boards, as well as computer coding. The camp also featured a variety of activities around Blacksburg's campus that highlighted different aspects of engineering.

Imagination Camp is an engineering camp for middle schoolers, in which pretty much we are trying to incentivate them to learn different engineering concepts. They are building CroQuest right now, which is a gaming console that we designed for them. We sort of want them to get excited about coding. What we want to teach them is really to solder. They're just soldering the board that we've given them, and we take care of teaching them, like, the basics of how circuits work or, like, a little basic preview of what we had to, like, go through in order to develop this project. I believe that in everybody's life, at some point, there was this igniter that started somebody's career. They are still learning what they want to do. And a lot of times they have, like, different interests. So, the best way that I find for them to kind of, like, start engaging in something is when they try different things. I hope it creates lasting memories. I know I've really enjoyed working on this project, so I hope they've also enjoyed it, as well.