A Special Summer Camp: Preparing African American Males for Energy and Education (PAAMEE)

Michigan Tech 'Latest News'

The PAAMEE program recruits promising high school students to study renewable and conventional energy.  



If someone says, "When life hands you lemons…" most people respond with lemonade. Not engineers; they'd say batteries.
Likewise, not all teenagers would be willing to give up their Saturdays. But for young men interested in engineering careers, PAAMEE takes a rather sour proposal—Saturday classes for three semesters—and turns it into a powerhouse of opportunity.  
Michigan Tech’s Summer Youth Program is hosting two groups of PAAMEE students from the Detroit area for week-long, hands-on summer camps on clean energy. One group was at Tech last week; the other is on campus this week.   
The PAAMEE program, funded by National Science Foundation (NSF), runs 1.5 years for each group. It is a collaboration among the Detroit Area Pre­College Engineering Program (DAPCEP), Lawrence Technological University, Michigan State University, Oakland University and Michigan Tech.






A group of PAAMEE students work on building small solar-powered lights.



Diversity in STEM
On the students' first day at Michigan Tech, they learned to make batteries from lemons. Two of the participants, Jamyl Washington and Ari Smith, explain that they used copper and zinc electrodes—attached to the lemon with little alligator clips—to power a small LED light. A simple chemical reaction pulls electrons from the zinc to the copper through the lemon.  Simple, but not easy.
"It can be frustrating because you're constantly refining the process," Smith says, though he thinks that holding a volt meter to a lemon battery and similar hands-on lessons are the best way to learn science. "I know the gist of the topics we're learning about, but now I'm getting into topics in-depth."





Ari Smith (right) says learning about energy has opened his eyes to many career options and interesting science.




During his Saturday classes downstate, Smith took on a project about biofuels; Washington ...

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