MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute (BWSI) is a free, four-week, rigorous STEM program for talented students entering senior year of high-school. In its third summer, it has grown to 8 projects with about 200 students from 105 schools across the U.S. plus teams operating remotely in Canada and Mexico. This summer’s program concluded last week in a final, all-day event of races of autonomous cars and air vehicles, as well as demonstrations of student projects such as satellite designs, Alexa-like cognitive assistants, and machine learning to detect cyberbullying on Twitter. See videos of the programs from 2018, 2017, and 2016, along with this 2017 blog post.

BWSI starts each year by enrolling teachers and students in December for online courses that begin in January. Students showing significant progress in the online course may apply in mid-March for the Summer Institute, which runs from early July into early August.

BWSI is organized by the MIT LL Beaver Works educational research collaboration between Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT campus. Beaver Works seeks to expand BWSI in future years to involve more schools in BWSI and also to make the BWSI curriculum available to other schools for developing local STEM programs. For information about how to incorporate BWSI into your own school curriculum, email bwsi-admin@mit.edu.