NAWCWD interns and SMART scholars teach SAME STEM camp

Inside a netted cage, two pilots flew blind. Turned away from the course, they steered by the radio calls of teammates: left, forward, forward.

Later the teams raced. One pilot flew into another drone and knocked it down. A mentor called out the result.

"We just won an aerial battle," he said. "We have a new ace on the team."

The ace was a high school student. The drones were quadcopters. The aerial battle was a race that ended in a collision. And the cage sat on a Navy installation, where Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division was teaching teenagers how the fleet does its job.

On July 21, NAWCWD led one phase of a week-long engineering camp for 38 high school students, then staffed it with its own interns and former scholarship recipients. A command that runs on technical talent spent the day building more of it.

The students came from 15 states. They are rising juniors and seniors, 15 and older. About 100 applied for 40 seats. The farthest traveled from New York and Connecticut. About eight came from the local area.

The Society of American Military Engineers runs this camp and five others nationwide. More than 500 students applied across all six. The Navy partners on two. Applications for next year open in December.

One scenario drives the week: a humanitarian mission to a fictional island wrecked by disaster. Students work through six phases, each mapped to a real Seabee engineering task. NAWCWD leads Phase 2, Engineering Reconnaissance.

The scenario is fiction. The engineering is not.

Dave Brewer directs the camp. The Navy has worked with the society here for about 20 years, the longest run of the six. Brewer wanted the day to show students more than construction.

"It would be real easy to talk about pouring concrete from a Seabee perspective," Brewer said. "But when you can take their minds and have them look at the other opportunities that a STEM career has, it's really cool."
The activities look like games. They run on doctrine.

The drone cage stood in the innovation lab. It simulates an aerial survey. In a real disaster, crews fly drones to map damaged infrastructure, spot hazards and correct bad maps before rescuers move in.

The exercise mirrors NAWCWD's own work in laser scanning and aerial mapping. The command develops and tests unmanned aircraft and the sensors that map a battlespace.

The rockets went up outside, in an empty parking lot behind the lab. Students built them from a scrap pile of metal and junk, "trash that can fly." Each rocket stands in for an improvised signal device, the kind that marks where rescuers should go for medical extraction.

One team taped its rocket to a squad flag to test it. The rocket failed, leaking water.

Lt. Harrison Boldt, the camp's deputy director and a Navy Civil Engineer Corps officer, measured the launches. He stood a measured distance back and read apex angles off a handheld device. The highest was 56 degrees.
Military aircraft flew overhead as the rockets climbed. Every head turned up. Most of the students had never seen anything like it, Brewer said.

Boldt never had this chance in high school. Now he volunteers a week to run it. People invested in him, he said, and this is how he pays it back.

"These kids are ridiculously smart," Boldt said. "They get screened from all over the country to come here and I learned something new every time I talk to them."

The day went beyond the field. Students toured Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 30, the Bloodhounds, at Point Mugu. They saw a C-130, a P-3 and a P-8.

They walked the construction site for the future MQ-25 hangar. Lunch was field rations on the beach. A core goal, Brewer said, is for students to understand what the Navy does.

NAWCWD's interns and recent scholarship hires ran the day's activities. Madison Long, hired through the Navy's Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation scholarship, led the water rockets. Kayla Tran led the drones.

Tran knows the pipeline from the inside. She earned the same SMART scholarship, which pays students through STEM degrees in exchange for Navy service. She now works as a NAWCWD engineer at the Sea Range.

"I only knew about these programs because my dad worked on base ... So I feel like these are really good at outreaching to kids," Tran said.

That reach matters most for students who would never find these paths alone. Alex Garcia, a NAWCWD intern, said the camp would have helped him in high school. He had not heard of the Navy's student programs until this summer.

The student who earned "ace" in the cage found the camp on his own. He searched online, saw a website, applied and won a seat. He arrived still deciding what to study.

"I have no idea," he said. "That's why I want to come to camps."

The camp broke at 2 p.m. The students headed back to build popsicle-stick bridges, the next phase of the mission.

Back in the cage, the pilots kept flying blind, learning to trust a teammate's voice. Some may build the Navy's aircraft and weapons one day. A few may come back to teach the next class, the way their instructors did.