If you’d like to adapt this, here is an Excel spreadsheet for you to download and edit!

This is the generic structure of the camp over the week: light activities to start the day like icebreakers or motivating videos, engineering activities through the late morning/early afternoon broken up by snack and lunch periods, and typically a speaker from Tufts to end the day. One full day is dedicated to touring labs within the department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Tufts, as well as the greater campus. This is done to show students what chemical engineers do on a daily basis! If there is no local university which would allow you to tour their chemical engineering labs, perhaps a nearby chemical engineering company can show students what real chemical engineers are doing every day.

Activities explore the chemical engineering concepts of heat and energy, polymers, membranes, reactions, separations, reactor design, product design, and process design. Within each, there is discussion included for more direct topics, like enthalpy, endothermicity/exothermicity, working within constraints, experimenting, and iteratively improving a design.

Specific activity pages link to extra resources to answer the especially curious students’ questions and videos which may be helpful to gather interest in the coming activity or simply give the students a brain break. If activities run over the scheduled time, snack time and lunch time can be used as informal discussion of the concepts they just explored.