Inside UPWARDS TechTrek: Preparing the Next Generation of Tech Innovators

This is the Virginia Tech, UPWARDS TechTrek high school summer camp. It is hosted by Brain Inspired Computing, Communication and Security Lab. This summer camp covers four different areas in electrical and computer engineering. The first one is semiconductor circuit and chip design. The second one is AI and machine learning. The third one is robotics and drones. The last one is FPGA, field programmable gate array, design and optimization. It's been a very interesting experience because I've just never been at a summer camp, or I've been able to get so hands-on and so deep into such a subject matter. This camp really sparked an interest in electrical and computer engineering for me, and I hope I can continue pursuing that field. After every presentation, we had labs, so if you didn't know what you were doing, they would explain it to you during the lab sessions. So this carefully allowed me to get into like how to build a circuit and how how things in components worked. Challenging camp, but it's really interesting. My favorite part was probably building the robots and like having the competition. I learned more about machine learning and Python, the history, how to code with Python. And so I learned more about how it functions and how I can implement that into engineering. I feel like it's great and they are very happy when they see their theoretical knowledge is backed by practical, hands-on experience. It's been really fun. The circuits have been really interesting and it's making me like to look into computer engineering and electrical engineering a little more than I did before. It's a great opportunity for them. They can start their engineering journey early, and then when they actually go to college, it'll be like, yeah, we already know about these things, so they'll be ahead of their peers.