This immersive course introduces students to the engineering design process by combining scientific inquiry, creative problem-solving, and hands-on prototyping. Students investigate real-world challenges while learning how engineers design, test, evaluate, and refine solutions within practical constraints such as cost, sustainability, durability, safety, and user needs.

Working collaboratively, participants develop prototypes through multiple design iterations while applying principles from materials science, experimentation, and engineering analysis. Students conduct controlled testing, collect and interpret data, and use evidence to improve their designs. Throughout the course, they also explore entrepreneurship by considering product feasibility, customer needs, manufacturing considerations, and value propositions.

By the end of the program, students will have experienced the complete engineering design cycle while developing technical, analytical, and communication skills that prepare them for future STEM coursework and innovation.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Apply the engineering design process to identify problems and develop creative solutions.
• Design, construct, test, and refine functional prototypes using evidence-based decision-making.
• Analyze the performance of materials through experimentation and comparative testing.
• Interpret experimental data to improve engineering designs and justify design decisions.
• Incorporate user feedback, cost considerations, and sustainability into product development.
• Communicate engineering solutions effectively through written documentation and presentations.

What does it take to build a future in STEM? This two-week precollege program, led by Dr. Ansley Booker of Dartmouth NEXT, invites students to explore the wide range of careers and pathways in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Through engaging seminars, hands-on workshops, and behind-the-scenes field trips, students will experience Dartmouth’s cutting-edge labs, medical centers, sustainability initiatives, and makerspaces. Along the way, they’ll learn from Dartmouth faculty, researchers, and alumni who are pushing the boundaries of innovation in medicine, engineering, data science, and beyond.
The program goes beyond exposure—it provides a roadmap. Students will gain practical tools for career readiness, from understanding the steps toward graduate school or research opportunities to connecting with mentors and building a professional network. The experience culminates in a closing symposium where each student presents a personalized “STEM Futures Pathway Plan,” reflecting the insights and inspiration gathered throughout the program. By the end of the two weeks, participants will not only discover what’s possible in STEM but also envision their own next steps with clarity and confidence.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify a wide range of STEM disciplines and career pathways through exposure to Dartmouth faculty, researchers, and alumni.
• Explain the steps involved in pursuing STEM careers, including higher education pathways, research opportunities, and professional development strategies.
• Engage with cutting-edge STEM research and innovation in fields such as medicine, engineering, sustainability, and data science.
• Develop foundational skills for career readiness, including networking, mentorship-seeking, and effective communication of personal goals.
• Reflect on their own interests and strengths to envision a personalized trajectory within STEM fields.
• Create a “STEM Futures Pathway Plan” that integrates academic exploration, career goals, and actionable next steps.

Tangible Outcomes

• Reflective Journaling: Capture daily insights and track evolving career interests, forming the foundation for the final project.
• Closing Symposium: Present a personalized “STEM Futures Pathway Plan” to peers and faculty, articulating both inspiration gained and concrete next steps.

Hands-On Activities

To achieve these outcomes, students will:

• Seminar Sessions: Participate in interactive talks led by Dartmouth faculty, alumni, and guest experts on STEM careers, innovations, and emerging fields.
• Hands-On Workshops: Experiment in makerspaces, medical labs, and sustainability centers, engaging directly with tools and techniques used by STEM professionals.
• Field Trips & Site Visits: Go behind the scenes at Dartmouth labs, research centers, and innovation hubs to observe cutting-edge science in action.
• Career Pathway Panels: Hear from alumni and professionals who represent diverse trajectories in STEM, followed by Q&A networking opportunities.
• Mentorship Activities: Pair with Dartmouth graduate students or researchers for guided conversations about academic and career journeys.
• Skill-Building Sessions: Learn practical skills in resume building, science communication, and how to prepare for college-level research.

Course Description

Engineering is a broad and exciting field! This course will explore this expansive and dynamic discipline through lectures, hands-on activities, and interactions with professionals. Students will get to dive into the different disciplines of engineering (e.g. aerospace, biomedical, chemical, civil, computer/software, electrical, environmental, mechanical, etc.) and be introduced to the engineering design process that is a unifying framework that applies across the field.

The lectures in this course will emphasize active learning while exposing students to different disciplines and potential careers. Several guest speakers and field trips will give students the opportunity to talk with real-world engineers and see their day-to-day work firsthand. In the capstone project, students will work in small groups to identify a real-world problem under a shared theme, and choose an engineering discipline that best fits their proposed solution.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completing this course, participants will be able to:

•  Identify and describe the major engineering disciplines and the types of problems each addresses.
• Apply the engineering design process, working collaboratively in teams, to solve a real-world problem.
•  Connect in-class concepts to real world applications through interactions with practicing engineers.

Please note: This course takes place at Kimball Union Academy.

Business Foundations, Introduction to Engineering, and Foundations in Medicine are held at Kimball Union Academy (KUA), a short drive from Dartmouth’s campus. Dartmouth instructors teach these introductory courses as part of Dartmouth Summer Scholars and students in these courses receive the same high-quality academic experience as students on Dartmouth’s campus.

The Meriden Valley program allows Dartmouth to welcome students as young as 14 to introductory courses that do not require prior experience in the subject. Students benefit from a residential setting with classrooms, dining facilities, recreation spaces, and residential staff.

Our Meriden Valley campus provides a music studio, art studio, fitness center, indoor fields, and basketball and tennis courts. This close-knit environment makes it easy for students to settle in, make friends, and feel supported from Day One. The result is a mix of rigorous academics and an authentic summer camp experience. Students spend their days in the classroom and their afternoons and evenings in clubs and community-building competitions. Weekends bring a day on Dartmouth’s campus and an off-campus excursion.

Course Description

This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the technologies, ethical questions, and policy decisions shaping the transition toward a more sustainable future. Through perspectives from climate science, engineering, economics, philosophy, medicine, and public policy, students explore practical solutions for reducing carbon emissions at both the individual and societal levels.

Participants calculate their own carbon footprints, analyze environmental data, debate climate policy, and investigate renewable energy technologies through case studies and collaborative projects. Throughout the course, students examine how scientific innovation, public policy, and individual action intersect to create meaningful environmental change while developing evidence-based strategies for decarbonization.

By the end of the course, students will understand both the complexity of climate challenges and the opportunities available to future leaders working toward a more sustainable world.

Learning Outcomes

• Analyze personal and societal sources of carbon emissions using scientific evidence.
• Evaluate renewable energy technologies and strategies for decarbonization.
• Interpret environmental data related to climate change, air quality, and sustainability.
• Examine ethical, economic, and policy perspectives surrounding climate action.
• Design evidence-based strategies that promote sustainability at local and global scales.
• Communicate environmental solutions through research, discussion, and collaborative presentations.

Course Description

For two weeks, the class will work as an engineering consulting firm to address one client request: design a clean, reliable, and affordable energy plan for a town. Students will form four teams, each responsible for one of four subsystems, demand, supply, reliability & storage, and mobility, and the teams must make their designs work together. Using real data and energy systems models built in spreadsheets (with optional Python), students explore real questions engineers face. How much power does a town need hour by hour? What mixes of solar, wind, fossil fuels, and batteries keep the lights on? What happens during a heat wave or a natural disaster? A short lecture each day will introduce concepts that scaffold to each team's design tasks, and the rest of the day will be dedicated to guided group work.

The course is grounded in the real-world energy transition. Students will tour energy infrastructure on campus, hear from practicing engineers, and use what they learn to shape their models. Daily cross-team check-ins will demonstrate show how one change can ripple through the system. Students will stress-test their plan against outages and affordability metrics, learning how energy systems planning serves real people. The course will end with the class presenting one integrated plan to a panel of guests.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completing this course, participants will:

• Explain how an energy system works, from generation through delivery to end use.
• Build and test simple models to size and compare energy technologies using real data.
• Evaluate tradeoffs among cost, reliability, emissions, and fairness, and show how model assumptions change results.
• Collaborate in an hybrid team to integrate separate subsystem designs into one coherent plan.
• Communicate technical findings clearly to a non-technical audience.

Course Description

Imaging has many fascinating applications — not just capturing faces and places, but also measuring distances to stars, resolving cell structures, and enabling autonomous driving, among many others. This Summer Scholars course covers computational imaging: the use of digital algorithms to unlock imaging capabilities that traditional photography cannot achieve. We will introduce optics, sensing, imaging algorithms, and machine learning, with an emphasis on hands-on hardware and software development. From building a camera to capture photos, to constructing a radar using tin cans, to using ML to enhance image quality, we will teach these concepts through hands-on tutorials and engaging, thought-provoking group projects.

How does a phone take a sharp photo in a dark room? How does a self-driving car see the road, and how do astronomers photograph galaxies millions of light-years away? In this two-week course, students learn how cameras and sensors work and how computers turn what they capture into images and useful information. Students will build a pinhole camera, photograph the Andromeda Galaxy, build a radar speed gun from tin cans, write programs that recognize faces and objects, and use an event camera to film a balloon as it pops. The course ends with a team project that students present on the last day.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completing this course, participants will:

• Understand key insights in optics, sensors, and signals
• Learn to: 
  Build a radar from handcrafted materials
  Understand how radios work and their surprising range of uses — from speed guns to astronomy to rocket landings
  Use microcontrollers to understand how small computers work
• Learn to:
  Understand how machine learning is shaping imaging
  Build a software application for an imaging system
  Use machine learning to improve the quality of captured images
• Complete a final project, such as:
  A processed photo of the Andromeda Galaxy, with an explanation of each step used to make it.
  A radar speed survey of bikes and cars on campus.
  A computer vision program, such as a game controlled by hand gestures.
  A side-by-side video of a fast event recorded with a normal camera and an event camera.

Course Description

Astrobiology, or the study of life in space, is becoming an increasingly important field of research for space agencies around the world. It combines knowledge from astronomy, engineering, biology, chemistry, geology, and more to ask questions about where life might exist, what it might look like, and how we can find it. Thanks to cutting-edge technologies in engineering, microbiology, and material science, planets besides Earth are more accessible than ever, and new instruments are constantly being developed to probe planetary atmospheres, surfaces, and subsurfaces, bringing us closer to answering the question: “Are we alone in the universe?"

In this course, you’ll learn from a NASA scientist about the basics of what makes a planet “habitable” and how we choose where to look for life in our solar system and around other stars. We’ll then look at the engineering solutions developed to lead this investigation, from high-orbit satellites to instruments designed to dig underground and everything in between. You’ll meet planetary scientists, engineers, and microbiologists and see how their everyday work answers fundamental questions about life in the universe. At the end of the course, you’ll be able to apply this new knowledge to propose your own life-detection instrument based on a given set of parameters.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completing this course, participants will:

• Be able to predict where life is likely to exist around a star based on physical properties of the system (e.g. temperature, radiation, geology).
• Discuss scientific and engineering challenges associated with searching for life in different planetary environments.
• Develop a foundational understanding of different types of spacecraft instrumentation commonly used to search for life and the broad capabilities of each.
• Complete engineering project: Design and propose a life-detection instrument based on a given set of parameters.

Course Description

How do engineers help doctors see inside the body, repair damaged tissue, or deliver drugs exactly where they are needed? This course introduces students to biomedical engineering, the field where engineering principles meet medicine and human biology. Through case studies, hands-on activities, and team design challenges, students will explore how engineering advances have transformed the way we diagnose, treat, and monitor disease. 

Topics include biomaterials, tissue engineering and wound healing, drug delivery, medical imaging, biomechanics, biosensors, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in medicine. Students will also discuss patient safety, regulation, and the ethical questions that come with new medical technologies. Field trips to research labs and conversations with engineers, clinicians, and graduate students will show students what a career in biomedical engineering looks like. The course ends with a team project in which students propose a solution to a real clinical problem.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completing this course, participants will be able to:

• Explain how the body heals after injury and how biomaterials and tissue engineering strategies can support repair and regeneration.
• Describe how common medical technologies work, including imaging systems, biosensors, and drug delivery systems, and identify where each is used in clinical care.
• Apply basic engineering and biomechanics concepts to understand human movement and solve practical medical problems.
• Discuss how data, computation, and artificial intelligence are changing biomedical research and patient care.
• Evaluate the safety, regulatory, and ethical considerations involved in bringing a new medical technology from the lab to patients.

Prerequisite: Biology + medicine or engineering course, club, extracurricular, or precollege experience

Course Description

Engineers, business leaders, doctors, and policymakers regularly make high-stakes choices with incomplete information and competing goals. Decision analysis offers a structured, rigorous way to approach these choices. This course introduces the principles of decision analysis through energy systems and climate change mitigation, where decisions often involve large investments, long time horizons, and deep uncertainty.

The course will start with students building a foundation in core concepts: structuring a decision problem, generating and evaluating alternatives, representing uncertainty with probabilities, understanding how attitudes toward risk shape choices, and weighing tradeoffs among multiple objectives. Students will also learn and practice expert elicitation, the process of gathering reliable judgments from specialists when data is limited. In the second week, students will apply these tools to a real-world energy or climate case study. They will examine the decision from multiple stakeholder perspectives, build influence diagrams and decision trees, and evaluate potential alternatives, gaining firsthand experience with the complexity of real decision making.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Structure a complex decision problem by identifying the decision makers, objectives, alternatives, and key uncertainties.
• Represent decisions and uncertainties using influence diagrams and decision trees and use these tools to compare alternatives.
• Explain how risk attitudes and competing objectives affect which alternative is preferred and apply a multicriteria method to evaluate tradeoffs.
• Use structured techniques to elicit probability judgments from experts and recognize common biases that affect those judgments.
• Analyze a real-world energy or climate decision from multiple stakeholder perspectives and communicate a well-justified recommendation.

Course Logistics

This course is held at both the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, New Hampshire and at the AMC Highland Center in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Learn more about the course logistics below. 

Sunday 7/18 - Friday 7/23: On campus attending classes and participating in recreational activities in the afternoons and evenings.

Friday 7/23 – Half day of class, then depart for the Highland Center.

Saturday 7/24 – Attend class at the Highland Center, then enjoy the unique environment in and around the lodge.

Sunday 7/25 – Half day of class, then depart for Dartmouth campus.

Monday 7/26 - Friday 7/30 – On campus attending classes and participating in recreational activities in the afternoons and evenings. Pick-up/departure on Friday. 

More about the Highland Center

The Highland Center sits at the epicenter of the White Mountain National Forest and is the AMC’s premier White Mountain lodge. The lodge provides a full buffet breakfast and a hearty, home cooked dinner each day. The program will provide lunches. Students utilize shared bathrooms (with showers) and shared bunkrooms, and have access to the lodge’s library, game room, and outdoor areas. In this beautifully rustic environment, students connect with each other and hikers from around the world in a unique way, and apply their Neuroscience knowledge in a spectacular outdoor setting.