community
MAD CAMP (Mobile App Development)
Casual League of Legends players and awesome IIT students Amy, Jorell and Matthew ran a Mobile App Development camp. They taught high school students Flutter, this is Google's UI toolkit for creating natively compiled apps quickly and professionally. After 4 weeks all of the high school students had functioning apps. One student reported she submitted her app to the Congressional app challenge and she was the winner for the 10th Congressional District. We are very proud of her! Here is her app.
Robots, Game Design and Programming - YMCA
Our YMCA program served 10 - 14 year old students in the communities that they live in. We sent IIT students to 7 different Y's to teach coding, circuits and game design to introduce young students to STEM subjects. The YMCA students were excited to meet college students. To know someone cares enough to come to them each day and teach through hands-on projects gave them a new sense of pride and confidence in their own abilities. Senator Dick Durbin came to visit one of our camps. We held the camps online for 2020, we were onsite in previous years.
Illinois Tech Esports: Xboxes for kids in hospitals
Our Illinois Tech Esports gamers worked hard to reconfigure Xbox Ones for kids in hospitals who are going through very difficult health issues. Illinois Tech students partnered with Gamers Outreach an organiztion that truly is bringing joy to kids by setting up gaming systems in the hospitals where they are being treated. Our alturistic students in the Illinois Tech esports community configured and delivered consoles to the kids.
SMASH Illinois on campus at Illinois Tech
The SMASH program was awesome this summer! Tracie Screven was the lead. Last year we had 39 students with us on campus for 5 weeks and we will be supporting them throughout the school year. The program sent 15 staff members to provide lessons and activities day and night. The students are all 9th graders who will return to us in their 10th and 11th grades. This year, the whole program successfully shifted online. By year 3 we will have up to 130 students in our program living in the dorms, improving math and science skills and learning what it takes to succeed in college
ACE Chicago Mentors: Summer Design Build Program
Our ACE Summer Design Build Program was a success in 2019! It was led by Jerome Thymes, an African American IIT alumni who graduated with a degree in architecture and who is now a public school teacher. We took a plain blacktop parking area and turned it into a colorful playground. We painted the building and the awnings of the YMCA and built seating, desks, a shade structure, chalkboard walls and a large xylophone model for the kids to play with. ACE is a national organization many of our students do internships with it's members. IIT is the home base for the Chicago summer design build program. Here is the video from last year's project that we did on the Illinois Tech Campus. In 2020 the ACE camp was a hybrid, part in person and part online. The client we built for was Blackstone Bicycle Works, on the southside of Chicago.
Pre-College Transportation Engineering (PRETRANS)
Our Pre-College Transportation Engineering (PRETRANS) Program is one of the first programs I worked on when I started at Illinois Tech in 2006.
Dr. Zhonghi Li and his graduate students make learning about civil and transportation engineering fun for a small group of high school students each year. Through hands on projects, field trips, guest speakers and more the IIT team does a great job helping students to understand one of the many paths available to anyone interested in engineering.