One of the field trips during the Young Dragons camp included an excursion to Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Educational Center. Photo courtesy of the Office of University and Community Partnerships.

While Drexel University’s Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center has offered the Young Dragons summer camp for local middle school students since 2016, this year’s program had more weeks, more participants, more programs, more partners and more field trips than ever before. 

The ExCITe Center, a transdisciplinary hub within University and Community Partnerships (UCP) for collaborations with neighborhood partners, regularly hosts the free summer camp providing science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) programming. That tradition continued this year as ExCITe Center staff and students worked with Dragons from five Drexel colleges and schools (plus one student organization) to hold hands-on, educational activities during six weeks of learning and fun.

Each week featured a different theme about a certain STEAM subject. Faculty and undergraduate and graduate students incorporated lessons, activities and field trips to teach about 25-30 total middle schoolers (who signed up for individual weeks).

Maggie Cohen, the manager of the Lindy Scholars Program who supervises all youth enrichment programs in UCP, led a team of Drexel students to seek collaborators, develop programming and run the entire camp from the ExCITe Center on the University City Campus.

“We're able to establish partnerships with the experts and resources we have right here at the University, and we can take the kids to different spaces on campus. That is so unique to Drexel,” Cohen.

Here's what all those Young Dragons partnerships looked like this year: 

• Week 1: “Physics in Action,” in partnership with the Physics Department in the College of Arts and Sciences and led by Michelle Dolinski, PhD, professor, and Christina Love, PhD, assistant teaching professor. For the first year of partnership with the Physics Department, students learned about particle physics and astrophysics and gained hands-on experience with industry-standard tools and techniques.
• Week 2: “BattleBots, Coding and Technology,” in partnership with Drexel Robotics, a student organization. BattleBots had been a favorite activity of students in previous camps, but this time it was led by undergraduate students who had previously worked with middle school students through the Lindy Scholars Program.
• Week 3: “Health Science Explorers,” in partnership with the College of Medicine and led by Annette B. Gadegbeku, MD, associate professor; chief of the Division of Community Health in the Department of Family, Community & Preventive Medicine; and senior associate dean of the Office of Community Health and Inclusive Excellence. Gadegbeku led last year’s health science week, and this year’s programming also included a field trip to the BODY WORLDS exhibition at the Franklin Institute.
• Week 4: “EnviroVentures,” in partnership with the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science (BEES) in the College of Arts and Sciences and led by fifth-year environmental science student Olivia Maddox. An honors student in the Pennoni Honors College, Maddox developed the programming while on co-op as a STEAM education assistant at UCP.
• Week 5: “Mad Science Mayhem,” led by Alissa Sperling, EdD ’23, a physics teacher and robotics coach who received a doctoral degree from the School of Education. A Drexel alumnus, Sperling had collaborated with other camps and summer programs at the University, but this was her first time working with Young Dragons.
• Week 6: “Girls in STEAM,” in partnership with faculty involved with the Black Girls STEAMing Through Dance after-school program: Ayana Allen-Handy, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Policy, Organization and Leadership in the School of Education; Valerie Ifill, assistant professor of dance in the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design; Michelle L. Rogers, PhD, associate professor of information science in the College of Computing & Informatics and Raja Schaar, associate program director and assistant professor of product design in the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. Westphal’s Game Design & Production program also participated in partnership with the ExCITe Center’s Entrepreneurial Game Studio (EGS) led by Frank Lee, PhD, EGS director and professor of digital media.

The participants of the “Girls in STEAM” week posed for this picture wearing some of the shirts they designed. Photo courtesy of the Office of University and Community Partnerships.

“We are continuously refining how we are supporting our partners, and that’s what makes the program go forward. They know the content, and we can offer the space and supplies and manage the marketing, scheduling, enrollment, free lunches and all of the logistics,” said Cohen.

The new “Girls in STEAM” week was added after most of the sign-ups were girls. The children learned how to code and also designed video games (inspired by the popular Fortnite series) using Dell-donated Chromebooks. The week ended with a first-of-its-kind Young Dragons event: a showcase for parents and families, during which children performed dances while costumed in T-shirts lit up by LED lights they had coded. Though this was the first year of partnering with the Young Dragons camp, Black Girls STEAMing Through Dance started running its program at the ExCITe Center and currently offers an afterschool program at the Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships.

 The environmental science week was a new addition planned by Maddox, the environmental science student on co-op. She assisted the other partners and day-to-day operations for the entire camp, but for “EnviroVentures” she also led the activities that brought in BEES doctoral students and faculty she had recruited. For example, children visited the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Educational Center and learned about volcanoes from volcanologist Loÿc Vanderkluysen, PhD, associate professor in the BEES department.

As part of the “Health Science Explorers” week, the middle schoolers got a firsthand look at a simulation lab in Drexel’s Health Sciences Building. Photo courtesy of the Office of University and Community Partnerships.

“The most rewarding thing was that one of the girls came up to me and she was like, ‘I already knew I wanted to be a geologist, but this confirmed that for me,’” said Maddox. “I thought it was so cool that she could get this experience so young because I didn't know I wanted to be in this field until I got to college and I changed my major after a year.”

For Maddox, having the opportunity to explain science to a younger audience helped bolster her science communication skills, which could be a benefit in the future.

“My goal with this last co-op was to see how you can use research or use what you know to inform the public. This had a lot of real-world experience showing how environmental education is so valuable, especially for young people,” she said. “This experience was a great way to use my skills in a different, hands-on way because all of my other co-ops had been research-based.”

Engaging in this kind of experiential education was something that Quinn Kessler also enjoyed while working at the Young Dragons camp. The user experience and interaction design major from the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design was involved through the Pennoni Honors College’s STAR (Students Tackling Advanced Research) Scholars Program, which supports first-year students completing a faculty-mentored research, scholarship or creative experience. Believed to be the first STAR Scholar from his major, Kessler developed a research-creative experience with his mentor, Vice Provost for University and Community Partnerships and ExCITe Center founder Youngmoo Kim, PhD, and co-mentor Cohen, the UCP program manager leading the camp.

Quinn Kessler presented his research at Drexel’s 2025 STAR Scholars Summer Showcase on Aug. 28. 

In addition to working as a camp counselor, Kessler built a digital platform informed by the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS) framework used to promote positive behavior in children. Usually available to schools and school districts, those digital PBIS platforms can be expensive, designed for long-term use and complex enough to require extensive training. Kessler created a pared-down, custom-made “Young Dragons PBIS System” for the camp — which could be updated for UCP’s other short-term, out-of-school programming. The platform tracked behaviors and outcomes using the “Dragon Dollar” system he designed to reward children for good behavior with “dollars” that could “buy” prizes like candy, art and science kits (the most popular prize was also the most expensive: KiwiCo STEM activity kits).

“I had learned how to do formal research in a classroom for assignments, but being in the field like this made me realize what I really was doing,” said Kessler. “Seeing the actual impact of it and seeing what I can do with it in real-world interactions was important for me. And the kids didn't really know what I was doing, so it was fun to share my experience with them while they were doing something new. We were both learning at the same time, and I think that was a lot of fun.”

Other Drexel undergraduate students worked as Young Dragons counselors and were involved in its planning, including UCP student employees Jeanna Steadman, an architecture student in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, and Greeva Yava, a computer science major in the College of Computing & Informatics. Wen Liu, a mathematics major in the College of Arts and Sciences, participated as a Drexel AmeriCorps Nonprofit Co-op student based out of the Lindy Center for Civic Engagement. 

When tallied with the other Drexel students, faculty and professional staff, there were equal numbers of Dragons and Young Dragons who spent time at the camp.

“I think this program is really about the power of partnerships,” said Cohen, the UCP program manager who oversaw the camp. “When we’re connecting with Drexel partners, that's where the magic happens.”