The MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute is a rigorous, world-class STEM program for talented rising high school seniors. The 2017 program featured three project-based, workshop-style courses. In the RACECAR course, students programmed small robotic cars to autonomously navigate a racetrack. For the Autonomous Air Vehicle Racing challenge, students designed quadrotors to fly autonomously in an aerial race. Students in the third workshop built their own Alexa-like cognitive assistants by applying techniques from artificial intelligence.

The 2017 MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute was a complete success thanks to the enthusiasm of our students, the dedication of our instructors, and the hard work of our team members. We partnered with 49 high schools to recruit the future engineers who participated in our program. We had the pleasure of working with 98 students, 63 of whom joined our program from outside Massachusetts.

In 2018 we hope that early-adopting high schools will implement our program for their students and join the final race day events.  Our courses would be just the beginning of the national and then international expansion of engineering education we want the Beaver Works Summer Institute to spark.

In the coming years, we will integrate new programs into this initiative, increasing participation substantially. We will support high school STEM teachers who use our teaching materials to help better prepare their students for college and beyond. We will also help other universities and high schools create similar programs, working to build a network of institutes to collectively improve engineering education worldwide. Contact us at bwsi-admin@mit.edu">mailto:bwsi-admin@mit.edu">bwsi-admin@mit.edu for information on how to adopt this program into your school curriculum.  If you are an international team that would like to participate you must have support of the MIT MISTI Program.

BWSI 2018 Timeline of Program requirements.

Thank you for your continued support of our program.