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Tri-County Technical College's Camp Success, a week-long day camp for rising sixth through eighth grade girls in the tri-county area, encourages students to learn about the possibilities in the engineering fields. Watch »

Photo by Ken Ruinard

Majayla Holland, 12, a student at Seneca Middle School, designs her own shoe at Camp Success, an engineering day camp at Tri-County Technical College. Rising sixth through eighth grade students learned about possibilities in engineering with a variety of hands-on projects through the week.

Photo by Ken Ruinard

Michelle Haynes, 11, of Anderson makes a binary bracelet with colors representing zeros and ones at Camp Success, an engineering day camp at Tri-County Technical College. Rising sixth through eighth grade students learned about possibilities in engineering with a variety of hands-on projects through the week.

Photo by Ken Ruinard

Taylor Driggers, 11, a student at Oakwood Christian School, joins in with other Tri-County Technical College Engineer Camp participants in designing a shoe. Girls going into sixth through eighth grade could sign up for the camp to learn about possibilities in engineering.

ANDERSON COUNTY — Attention, girls: Think pink calculators, scientific ones.

With the baby boomer generation retiring, more and more job openings are benig in the engineering field.

To that end, about 20 girls attended Camp Success this week at Tri-County Technical College’s Pendleton campus to learn more about careers in the engineering field.

“A lot of kids don’t know about a lot of those careers,” Stephanie Evans, camp leader, said.

The camp is sponsored by the Silver Crescent Foundation, and is assisted by the Industrial and Engineering Technology division of Tri-County Technical College. Based in Charleston, the Silver Crescent Foundation helps prepare students to enter the workforce through the South Carolina Technical College system.

The day camp tries to make the rising sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade girls more interested in the field of engineering, which already has a shortage of women.

Some fun activities that the girls participated in this week included:

• building shoes from cardboard, paper, and other craft materials
• creating binary bracelets translating each girls’ birthday into colorful beads
• and, the big finale at the end of the week is building an ice cream sundae machine. The machine in comprised of three different robots that create a final product of an ice cream sundae for the girls and their parents to enjoy.

The camp only cost each girl $25. Each receives a T-shirt that shows their camp success pride.

“You always don’t see what an engineer does because they’re always kind of behind the scenes,” Evans said. “This camp gives the girls the chance to see what these careers are all about.”

Friday is the last day of the camp, until next year, when a new group of girls who are excited about engineering fill the 20 people maximum for a week of fun and excited activities.

For more information or how to learn how to enroll in next year’s program, visit campsuccess.org.