Abstract:

Axt@Teen summer camp, an initiative led by CSOFTMTY (Consejo para el Desarrollo de la Industria de Software in Nuevo Leon), strives to develop youth abilities needed in the transforming digital era. It has been carried out in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, since 2017.

The training is delivered in a fun high-level environment thanks to the work of mentors and volunteers from local universities (Tec of Monterrey, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Universidad de Monterrey and Universidad Regiomontana), and IT (Information Technology) companies as Motorola, Accenture and Softtek, among others.

All these actors make an alliance with the CSOFTMTY in order to contribute to strengthening the educational system of the state of Nuevo Leon.

The camp is structured as a series of free workshops that students can take according to their interests. Some of the workshops include: algorithmic thinking development, design thinking, apps programming, competitive programming, robotics, data science, drones programming, additive manufacturing and cybersecurity.

It is an inclusive program in which more than 60% of the students come from public schools and about 35% are girls.

In order to measure the impact of the program to raise the number of students in IT and Engineering majors, a couple of questionnaires are applied regularly to the students, one at the beginning of the camp and another at the end.

Students are asked about their general opinion regarding the course taken, if they would participate again, if they would recommend it, if it was fun, if they learned interesting things, about the performance of the instructors and volunteers, what they liked, what they did not like and the topics that they would be interested in learning in future camps, their self-perception about their abilities using and doing technology, and their motivation to study a career related to IT.

From 2017 to 2019 the camp was held in person, face to face, and it had very good results in increasing the number of students in IT and Engineering majors. It annually attended around 300 youth between 10 and 18 years from Nuevo Leon, Mexico and other states.

In 2020, due to the Covid 19 pandemic, CSOFTMTY and all his partners faced the challenge to continue contributing to society through Axt@Teen in a virtual form.

Attendance, tiredness, changes in calendars, the use of different technologies to broadcast the workshops were some of the main challenges which had to be overcome. Still, surprisingly, more than 200 students participated in both 2020 and 2021 editions, from 4 countries and 14 states in Mexico. The applied instruments showed that the program had a similar impact to the one before the pandemic on the self-perception of their abilities to use and do technology, as well as on their interest in studying IT careers.

Here we present the challenges, the actions carried out, the positive and negative results found throughout this time.

Keywords:

Summer camp, information technologies, STEM, Covid 19, pandemic, education, digital transformation, Mexico.