Notes ·
A Summer Camp Helped Every Student Earn a Ham Radio License
Joshua MorrisI like this for a couple of reasons. The obvious one is ham radio. But the more interesting part is what the license gave the students at the end of the week: something real.
The Alliance for Indigenous Math Circles runs free camps for Native American students in the Four Corners region. Students spend the week on mathematics, engineering, science, and culturally connected projects. Shree was one of 10 student interns at a camp in Santa Fe. After dinner, the interns ran a two-hour program called Radio Weaves—Gimkit games, groups of two or three, preparation for the FCC Technician exam. Nearly everyone passed on the first attempt. The rest got more help and tried again. Eventually, every student earned a license. That is pretty awesome.
There are plenty of ways to teach electronics—build a circuit, program a robot, launch a model rocket. Those are all good. Ham radio has an additional property I think makes it unusually compelling: when you finish learning, you gain access to something that continues existing after the class ends. The license isn't a certificate saying you attended a STEM activity. It means you are now licensed by the FCC to operate an amateur radio station. The student can go home, get a radio, get on the air, join a club, experiment with antennas, talk through repeaters, learn digital modes, communicate through satellites, or disappear down any of the hundreds of wonderfully nerdy rabbit holes amateur radio contains. Passing the Technician exam is the beginning rather than the end.
Radio also forces you to interact with things you cannot see: frequency, propagation, modulation, interference, antennas. You change something physical and observe what happens somewhere else. A phone works because an enormous invisible system has already been built for you. Ham radio starts much closer to radio + antenna + electromagnetic waves = hello. Obviously it can become considerably more complicated from there. That's the fun part.
IEEE describes amateur radio to the students as communication that doesn't require the Internet or cellular towers. Almost every tool a teenager encounters depends on somebody else's infrastructure. Ham radio can be two people with radios.
The larger story is about representation in STEM. The Alliance deliberately brings Indigenous scientists, engineers, educators, and cultural knowledge into the program because Native American students remain significantly underrepresented. It is much easier for a kid to imagine becoming an engineer when "engineer" becomes somebody they actually met. The radio license works particularly well here because it creates an immediate identity change too. Yesterday: student learning about radios. Today: licensed radio operator. That is small, but I don't think it is insignificant.
Shree wasn't an adult engineer arriving to run a program—she was a high school student herself. She had grown up attending IEEE Princeton Central Jersey Section meetings with her mother, started helping at events, and wound up volunteering at the camp. Then she came home noticing another barrier: some students enjoyed chess but couldn't afford U.S. Chess Federation membership fees. So she started baking and selling cookies through Rukie Cookie and has sponsored six memberships so far.
I love that progression. Someone brought a kid to engineering meetings; the kid became useful; people gave her opportunities; she used one to help another group of kids; then she noticed another problem and started trying to solve that too. That is how communities are supposed to work.
Kids can tell when we give them toy problems. Whenever possible, I think the better ending is something real. Don't just teach radio theory—help them earn the license. The thing does not need to be enormous. It just needs to continue mattering after the lesson ends. Every student in that camp eventually left eligible to get on the amateur radio bands and start experimenting for themselves. Hopefully a few of them get completely lost in it.