ASM Teacher Camps - 2025

2025! 

That's the future, folks! 

Welcome to the future!

If you want to know how to be successful in that future, check out the ASM materials camp for teachers. 

The schedule for the 2025 summer camps is available online, and if you need to be convinced that the teachers camps are amazing, check out all the videos I've posted about the camps. There's no better sales pitch than the testimonials from our attendees.

Year 1 Camp - End of Week Feedback

It goes without saying, but there are so many things that we've lost in the pandemic.

One of those things that we've lost - or at least that we didn't get for a couple of summers - is the in-person, summer, ASM teacher workshops.

The summer workshops are easily the most valuable professional development experiences I've ever been a part of, and I get a lot out of them both when I've taken them and when I've helped lead them.

The above video is the end of the week feedback from the teacher campers from the 2014 camp at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana. I'm happy to say that this was one of the camps that I helped lead with Andy Nydam, one of our lead master teachers. All of the campers were asked to give a little summary of their week to camera as recorded by Glenn Daehn - who's been on the blog before. It's the kind of feedback we ask for from all of our campers at each camp, but this week we were lucky enough to get it recorded.

This camp was one of our residential camps, and lots of the campers came from hours and hours away, stayed in the dorms of Montana Tech, ate at the university's cafeteria, and spent their evenings together touring the city of Butte. We were able to see Berkeley Pit, tour a silicon purification plant, go down into Montana Tech's teaching mine, and take an historic tour of Butte as lead by a local history teacher.

For the past two summers we've run the camps as virtual experiences, and I've been impressed with how well ASM has managed to translate the camp experience into an online world...

..but the online experience isn't the in-person experience, as we're all well aware.

When we get through this mess, come and take a camp with us if you haven't before.

And if you have taken one before, come back and take another one. We'd love to see you again, and I promise that at least some of the content will be different. We've had a couple of years of playing around in our classrooms to find new things to do.

Oh, and Dr Daehn did record slightly longer sessions with some of the campers at that Montana Tech camp. You can check out that full playlist at this link.

Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development

Teaching the teachers: how a unique summer program is helping Tennessee teachers tackle science instruction.
Posted by Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development on Wednesday, July 29, 2015

It's always nice to hear good things about our summer teacher camps, especially from folks who aren't part of the program...like when the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.

Congrats to Lisa and Ogiemwonyi and Mort Schaffer who took our show on the road to Spring Hill, TN to not a high school or exactly a university but rather the Northfield Workforce Development and Conference Center.

The Elements Unearthed - material science workshop

Edit: Sadly, David Black's website is no longer active as of 3/16/24.

Edit: It's seemingly back up and live as of 9/6/26.

The Elements Unearthed tells the tales of a science teacher, David V Black, at the Walden School of Liberal Arts in Provo, Utah. Black's vitae is an impressive list of projects that he and his students have taken on through the years.

Perhaps most impressively, though, Black took our ASM summer, teacher workshop in Ogden, Utah two summers ago (in 2013) and put together an outstandingly thorough report on his time there and the labs and demonstrations during the week.

If you're considering the camps, check out Mr Black's report of the camps. You can get a good idea - with some pictures - of what you'll be getting yourself into.

Administrators go to camp at WSU for STEM refresher course

Administrators?

The summer camps are about a lot more than administrators. Administrators are, of course, welcome and have attended in the past. We'll just have to change a few of our jokes.

This article from the Ogden Standard-Examineris titled as though the camp attendees are all administrators, but the article itself doesn't mention a single administrator. The article describes a lab in the teachers camp - heat treating of steel; gets a few quotes from the two master teachers and a couple of attendees; and offers up a few reasons why the camp is important.

From Adam Johnston, Weber State University physics professor:

The purpose of this camp and science education in general is to promote enthusiasm for the sciences,” he said. “We would like to see a lot of different people working in the sciences. There are a lot of great employment opportunities, and STEM knowledge is great for future jobs and for the economy. And we believe that scientifically literate people are able to make better decisions for themselves, for their communities and for voting. Understanding science helps people understand the issues at hand and make better decisions.”

ASM San Antonio Materials Camp

Great intro there -"a free, week-long camp dedicated to showing them how to turn ordinary pocket change into golden teaching tool[s]."

Yeah, it's hoaky, but that's a fair statement for what Debbie and Gissel were doing in the San Antonio camp in 2013. It's some nice coverage from the local news station.

Materials camp for teachers recap

Well, of course the teachers loved the camp. The camps are awesome.

I've never been to our Princeton summer camp, but I have worked with Brian Wright (seen at 0:26 and a few other times) who I know has lead the Princeton camp a number of times. Admittedly, I don't know Michael Ireland (shown at 1:26), but I'm sure he's awesome, too.

All-in-all, it's a nice summary of and advertisement for the summer camps.

Science camp: Living in a materials world

This video is of the Howard University ASM teachers materials camp in the summer of 2012.

The video was filmed and published by Stars & Stripes, a YouTube channel that (in their words) "exists to provide independent news and information to the U.S. military community, comprising active-duty, DoD civilians, contractors, and their families."

It's a fairly standard format: ASM official (Charles Hayes) speaks, labs are shown being done, teacher attendee describes a lab. The only thing missing was a teacher attendee giving a testimonial about the camp.

I particularly loved seeing the borax glass drop (at 0:48) pick up more borax that starts to degas and puff up.

Training Camp for Science Teachers

Image source - http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i21/Training-Camp-Science-Teachers.html

The summer of 2012 saw a number of new teacher camps as the ASM Foundation continued to expand the materials science teacher camps to a larger and larger audience. One of the new camps was held at the University of Indianapolis, and we (I taught the camp that year with Becky Heckman) were lucky enough to get a pop-in from Mitch Jacoby from Chemical & Engineering News. Mitch's article took a few months to find its way into print, but the article is well worth a read.

I am particularly happy about the last few paragraphs...

ASM’s data show that of the roughly 4,000 “graduates” over the past 10 years, about 60% of whom teach high school chemistry, more than 80% incorporate some of the camp activities into their teaching.

Marilyn Weiss, who teaches Advanced Placement and other chemistry classes at Park Tudor Upper School in Indianapolis, says she includes many of the lessons she learned at the camp last summer. Examples include exercises on metal plating and electrochemistry, as well as experiments on the properties of metals and alloys and physical differences between two polymers.

In addition to picking up valuable teaching techniques, Tracy Schloemer, a 10th-grade chemistry teacher at Denver School of Science & Technology, says she made great contacts at the camp last summer. “As a teacher, I find networking can be tough. The ASM camp enabled me to meet a diverse crowd of teachers and academic faculty.” Schloemer gives the camp a thumbs-up and is quick to recommend it to colleagues. “It’s free, and you get plenty of stuff to use in the classroom. Why wouldn’t you want to go?”

Thanks for the good coverage, Mitch

Princeton materials Science Camp for Teachers

That's a pretty fair description of the ASM summer camp from Dan Steinberg...

This is a five-day, intensive camp to teach materials science to materials science teacher taught by master teachers and Princeton professors.

Brian Wright, seen at 0:25 and again at 0:49, has been teaching the Princeton camp for a number of years. It's great to see an ASM volunteer, a Princeton professor, and a whole lot of excited teacher campers.

This video is a well-produced, fairly slick promo video about the Princeton summer ASM camp.

Clips from PCCM's 1st Materials Camp for Teachers

I wish I had one of those maroon polo shirts. In our program the number of different color polo shirts is a little bit of a badge of honor. The more colors, the longer a teacher has been part of the program. I'll admit to having a geeky pleasure when I could go a full five days without repeating any colors this summer. Take that, Becky!

This isn't any sort of finished product. It's a bunch of barely edited clips from PCCM's - Princeton Center for Complex Materials - first ever summer materials science camp for teachers, probably from 2004. Most of the clips are of camper teachers giving remarks toward the end of the camp.

It's interesting to see some of the older ways that we did the labs - piling cement blocks on the concrete bars for destructive testing. Through the years the labs have certainly been refined, as has the whole curriculum.

It's good to hear many of the same compliments from the camper teachers that we still hear - that applied knowledge is more important than theory without application, the materials for the activities are cheap, demonstrations with explanations are powerful, the information is relateable for both upper- and lower-level students, and that the summer workshop is the best workshop they'd ever been to.

Mississippi Mornings #2 6-10-2013

Good morning!




Friday at Meridian High School was apparently a little crowded as this is the second report broadcast and recorded while the campers were measuring Young's modulus.

Great job from camper Perry Buxton reminding us that students need to do things instead of just practicing for the state tests.

Teachers Using Everyday Objects to Teach

It's always good to get a some good press for the local teachers and organizers of one of our ASM summer teacher camps. It's not always as much fun to be asked to explain the camp to reporters in a few soundbites.

Todd, however, did a nice job when the Meridian press stopped by on Friday during the June 2013 teachers camp at Meridian High School in Meridian, MS to put together the above report, interviewing one camper and one master teacher and showing the campers measuring Young's modulus on composite day.

In a neat turn, the camp didn't have any spot plates for the bismuth-tin alloy lab (to demonstrate the eutectic point). The master teachers improvised and finally landed on the solution shown at 1:00 in the video: plaster of Paris molds using Whoppers for the forms. According to Caryn Jackson, they first tried glass beads (like those found in a Pente game) and grapes before settling on the Whoppers. Apparently the Whoppers also had the benefit of leaving a little wax/chocolate coating behind that seemed to ease the spots' journey out of the molds.

Nice save, Todd, Tom, and Caryn.

Teachers head back to school in Tuscaloosa

In June of 2013 channel 42 out of Birmingham, AL stopped by the University of Alabama's ASM summer teacher camp and produced the above video and this story for their newscast and website.

It's not a huge part, but it does show a quick glimpse of the campers doing NACE lab #2 - Mr. Copper and Miss Sulfate.

Having been in Alabama when this was filmed, I can successfully say that the campers did successfully develop the activity series.