Abstract
Conference Title: 2019 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) Conference Start Date: 2019, April 8 Conference End Date: 2019, April 11 Conference Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates Professions in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are the driver for technological innovation and economic growth. However, Educators are facing challenges creating awareness and excitement for STEM careers to attract young students to the field. Due to teenagers’ wide interest in mobile technologies, our camp used smartphones as a context to teach programming. We organized a one-week summer camp targeting middle and high school students. The camp introduced mobile application development using basic web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). Therefore, this paper presents an experience report describing our approach and the most innovative activities that were applied. Our evaluation of the camp includes surveys and the students’ projects to measure the success of the camp in reaching its objectives. The results show that the students enjoyed the camp, learned and used the main concepts in their projects, and became interested in the field. We also discuss the limitations and future improvements based on our experience and observations.