Summer Partnership Courses Give Window into Technical World

By Ed Finkel

The CTD Summer signature academic experience provides fast-paced, inquiry-driven rigor that we often characterize as “college-level” coursework. However, our advanced learners are often ready to go beyond the classroom and test-drive their careers.   

And regardless of whether a student’s talent pathway includes college, many can benefit from bootcamp-style experiences that offer the apprenticeship components (training, practice, mentorship) needed to develop competency—and then mastery—of a wide range of technical skills.

That was the thinking of Cassie Sparkman, former CTD summer program coordinator, when she started the CTD Summer Partnership courses 10 years ago in tandem with a mix of third-party software and curriculum developers, according to Ruth Doan, who succeeded Sparkman and continues to run the program.

“I think of these courses as boot camps, as technical summer intensives, or as apprenticeships for middle- and high-school students,” she says. “This kind of experience, for a gifted population, is not available in a K-12 classroom. It is available at a technical college, or at a career or technical school. It’s available during an internship. And so [Sparkman] really believed in apprenticeship as a learning model and understood that young adults need mentors within their domains of talent in order to progress along their talent pathway.”

This summer, CTD is offering a total of seven courses, four targeted to middle-school students and three to high-school students, with a trio of expert partners, Doan says. While they vary in content, there are some consistent features among them.

“They’re all based in problem-solving and using the human-centered design process: to discover, to define, to ideate, to prototype, test, iterate and launch,” she says. “Sometimes, this design process is visualized as a circuit or a cycle. But they’re all engineering, problem-solving, design based. And there’s also a capstone creative output that is the result of a collaboration on a team.”

Two of the courses this summer will be in partnership with Windy City Lab, the brainchild of former IBM Deck5 software developer Kevin McQuown, who now does contract development work and has been involved with Summer Partnership courses from the beginning. Some former students now work either for McQuown or elsewhere in the field after gaining the benefits of his mentorship, Doan says.

The courses McQuown will teach are “AI Applications in Computer Science” and “Computer Engineering,” both aimed at high-school students, and both held in Northwestern’s Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center—the same setting as many of NU’s undergraduate engineering courses. “That’s really cool, from the standpoint of, ‘Here is a picture of what life after high school could look like for you,’ ” Doan says.

Uncharted Learning, another charter partner in the program, will deliver three courses this summer, all aimed at middle-school students: “Business Enterprising,” where students will learn to create, market, sell and evaluate the performance of a new product concept, working as part of a team; “Introduction to Mobile Coding and Game Design,” designed for coding beginners; and the related “iOS Bootcamp and Game Development,” which requires previous coding experience and is more accelerated in pace, Doan says.

Former students in the latter two courses who have enrolled as Northwestern undergraduates serve as teaching assistants, she says, and others have become interns at Apple. 

“These courses are built on the belief that hands-on, human-centered problem-solving gives our students the opportunity to test-drive a career, and then pursue it,” Doan says. “When you see a student becoming a TA, [or] becoming an intern at Apple, you can see the professional scaffolding, the mentorship. You can see the pathway for someone who has a passion for coding and problem-solving and has been given, through these courses, increasingly more responsibility within a domain of talent. … We have the privilege of seeing them emerge.”

AI Discovery Academy, which has been part of the Summer Partnership program for the past two years, will offer “Robotic Vehicles,” targeted to middle-school students; and IoT Engineering for high-schoolers, both of which “fall into a robotics and micro-controllers niche,” Doan says.

“The Robotic Vehicles course is a little more plug-and-play. It’s DIY Robotics for beginners,” and can lead into a high-school “Introduction to Mechatronics” class that’s not part of the Summer Partnership roster, she says. “This [Robotic Vehicles] class will leverage artificial intelligence as a design collaborator with these engineering teams. And the same is true with the IoT Engineering course for high-school students. Students are testing code, reducing the amount of time between concept and field testing by critically leveraging the AI tools that are out there.”

Ultimately, courses in the Summer Partnership Program are “laser-focused on career preparation,” Doan says. “Students are solving real-world problems with newly acquired skills with the support of experts in the field. They are getting to do real work, with the support of someone who knows what they’re talking about, not because they earned a specific degree but because they’ve done the technical work.”

She adds: “That’s best practices. It is putting students inside of a real problem—which is what adults in the workforce are doing, is solving problems, every day. It’s authentic.”

For more information about our partnership courses, please view our grades 6-12 summer program page.