Energy Unplugged Summer Camp Fuels Curiosity and Innovation in K-12 Students

The Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center (EPICenter) hosted the 2024 cohort of Energy Unplugged, a Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) summer program for high school students. The weeklong camp was held at Georgia Tech’s Atlanta and Savannah campuses this summer and has earned a reputation as one of the most sought-after high-school-level summer camps hosted by Georgia Tech. 

Rich Simmons, director of Research and Studies at the Strategic Energy Institute, has been the driving force behind the camp since its inception in 2019. Simmons, a faculty instructor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, brings his award-winning teaching expertise to high school students, ensuring that each session of Energy Unplugged is both educational and engaging. The program covered a range of timely topics, from basic energy principles such as conservation laws, electric circuits, and battery storage to more complex subjects like environmental impacts, data analytics, and decision-making. In addition, students were immersed in hands-on activities, interactive demonstrations, and power plant site visits.

During the first two days, students formed teams to construct catapults and mousetrap cars, discussed the underlying physics involving energy conversion, and then launched projectiles and vehicles to test their predictions. In one of the camp’s most popular activities, students raced remote-controlled cars around an obstacle course to learn about the importance of balancing multiple objectives, such as energy use, elapsed time, safety, and cargo capacity. The week culminated in a small-group mini-project, where campers applied the skills they had acquired to solve a real-world challenge — to optimize a cooking process using solar energy. Given specific parameters on energy generation, storage, and meal demand, the students determined the best approach to convert solar energy for cooking and storage to meet a daily lunch and dinner schedule for a food truck business. The program concluded with the campers presenting their preferred designs to an audience of parents, faculty, and staff, adding public speaking and technical presentation skills to their summer experiences.

Every year, students highlight the energy field trips to power plants, data centers, robotics labs, and makerspaces as some of their favorite aspects of the camp. A student poll during the final presentations used words like fun, informative, interesting, magical, epic, exciting, educational, and fantastical to describe the camping experience. The camp introduced the students to STEM-related careers and the many undergraduate programs that could provide a pathway for them. 

Energy Unplugged provides a portal for Georgia Tech graduate student interns such as Jake Churchill and staff members such as Jordann Shields to engage students with energy concepts, activities, career paths, and information about attending Georgia Tech. 

Energy Unplugged is administered by Georgia Tech Summer P.E.A.K.S. (Program for Enrichment and Accelerated Knowledge in STEAM) at CEISMC (the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing), the primary connection point between Tech faculty and students and the K-12 STEAM education community. Annually, CEISMC programs are accessible to more than 39,000 students; 1,700 teachers; and 200 schools in over 75 school districts throughout Georgia.

As part of the Strategic Energy Institute, EPICenter taps into regional and national expertise within academia, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and research facilities to provide an unbiased and interdisciplinary framework for driving innovation in energy policy and technology in the Southeast.