Overview
The Tapia Camps are award-winning residential STEM camps for rising 8th-12th graders at Rice University that emphasize communication. Campers complete STEM projects and presentations as they experience life as a Rice student for a week. Rice University is one of the nation's foremost research institutions consistently ranked in the top 20 universities in the United States.
STEM Camps: Tapia STEM Camps explore a wide range of STEM topics through hands-on challenges and activities. Students will learn about data centers and their impacts, particularly their high energy and water demands. They will take on a heat-transfer challenge by building their own heatsink, a critical element in a computer's hardware design that removes heat from electronic components by absorbing it and releasing it into the surrounding air. Students will also investigate techniques to counteract the environmental impacts of data centers, building model wind turbines and carbon capture and storage (CCS) reservoirs. Furthermore, they will explore how data centers and algorithms shape real-world decisions by designing a college admissions algorithm, using physics and math to identify AI-generated videos, and learning how algorithms can hide and detect secret messages in images.
Beyond these activities, students engage in additional educational opportunities, including the STEM Fair: an interactive science and engineering showcase with booths led by university students, featuring demonstrations and mini-projects in mathematics, physics, geology, and other STEM fields.
