Camp season concludes on campus

The Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering hosted three outreach camps for high school students this summer with the 55 students coming from as far away as Dubai (their parents are SDSU graduates who were here during camp week).

The breakdown, in order of occurrence, shows 12 for Youth Engineering Camp, 26 for Precision Ag Camp and 17 for Data Science Camp.

A short summary of each camp follows.

Precision ag camp gives high schoolers a technology nudge

Twenty-six high school students from as far away as Duluth, Minnesota, and Rapid City spent two days on the South Dakota State University campus getting hands-on learning for digital and technical systems inside heavy equipment, solving real-world maintenance problems and competing in contests with full-scale equipment.

This was the third year that the precision ag program within the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering and Titan Machinery, an ag and construction dealer network with locations through the Midwest and West as well as internationally, conducted the camp, which this year was July 15-16.

Participants ranged from students going into ninth grade to 12^th grade and came with a desire to learn a little more about the ever-automating field of precision agriculture.

There were classroom sessions on field, soil and yield mapping as well as a troubleshooting session in the shop of the Raven Precision Agriculture Center on campus and a chance to fly drones.

However, the biggest impression that was made on students was when they headed to the tailgating area north of the football stadium for a series of challenges:

• Driving a New Holland CR890 combine, 

• Testing the automated steering on a Case IH Magnum 355 tractor by ‘golfing’ via setting an A-B line with the tractor’s precision system. 

• Using the arm of a mini-excavator to grab a football or basketball off a cone and then move the arm to place the ball in a nearby bucket.

• Driving a side-by-side fitted with sprayer booms and a lot of precision technology.

Nic Uilk, the Klingbeil Endowed Educator in Precision Agriculture at South Dakota State University, said the camp offers students a valuable opportunity to explore careers in the precision agriculture field while gaining hands-on experience with the same advanced technology and equipment used daily by farmers and ag retailers. 

“Students particularly enjoyed working directly with the tools and discovering how they can help shape the future of agriculture,” Uilk said.

Andrea Haugland, who organized Titan’s efforts, said, “This camp lets students explore how GPS systems, data insights and advanced machinery are reshaping modern farming. Introducing these careers and opportunities early helps students find exciting paths while strengthening the future workforce that keeps agriculture moving forward. 

“SDSU has been a great partner in bringing this camp to life with their knowledgeable teaching Staff in the and great facilities. 

The fourth annual camp is tentatively set for mid-July 2027.

Data science campers get taste of AI programming

Sixteen high school students from near and quite far away learned basic programming, data analytics and created their own data science project at the July 27-30 Data Science Camp at South Dakota State University.

The free annual event was again led by lecturer William Alsaker and professor Xijin Ge from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

The group included seven from Brookings, two from Sioux Falls, three elsewhere in South Dakota, two from Iowa, one from Denver with local relatives and two from Dubai. Their parents graduated from SDSU and the father was relocated to the Dubai Daktronics office. The girls attended the camp while the family was visiting this summer

Based in Solberg Hall, the students learned basic "R" programming through examples, learned how to create statistics through activities like analyzing claims about the number of chocolate chips in cookies, and learned how to utilize artificial intelligence programs to create the programming for basic games that could run in a web browser.

Alsaker noted this year’s students created a little more advance games than in past years. Some examples included a 3-D foosball simulator, a pool simulator, a 3-D chess game, a cooking simulator game, a dungeon crawler game and an adventure game in an outdoor environment.

Each student also created a data science project that they demonstrated to their families on the final day. Some examples were a weather app, a data dashboard devoted to the rise of girls in high school wrestling and a webpage to teach science facts to kids about storms and natural disasters. 

Their projects can be found here: https://gexijin.github.io/camp/2026/

They also toured campus, the South Dakota Art Museum and McCrory Gardens. Evenings were spent at the Wellness Center, watching movies and bowling.

High school campers get taste of engineering at State

Faculty member Jason Sternhagen and electrical engineering major Clayton Willis help high school students attending Youth Engineering Adventure June 14-18 hosted by Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering. The dozen students from Minnesota, Iowa and South Dakota were testing the battery-powered, photo-resistor guided cars they had made in a lab in Daktronics Engineering Hall. 

The camp allows students an opportunity to explore all engineering types the college has to offer. Other activities included building a balsa bridge, checking out the SDSU student-made Formula car and NASA contest rovers, flying drones, going on a geometry scavenger hunt and touring labs throughout the college.

Free time included going to Miller Wellness Center, kayaking, the movies and ping pong. The camp is designed to expose students to various engineering fields as they begin to formulate their educational choices.