In Oklahoma, quantum science makes for happy campers

Many kids decide early in their schooling whether they are ‘science people.’

“By high school, people have decided that they don't like science, somehow,” says Mario Borunda, an associate dean at Oklahoma State University. This makes it important to “catch people early on, when they might be still interested.”

Intent on reaching young people, Borunda teamed up with Derek Meyers and Julius de Rojas to apply for — and receive — an APS Innovation Fund grant to sponsor a ten-day, residential quantum science learning camp for sixth through ninth graders.

The team was one of six grant recipients for the fund this year, all of them aligned with the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. The other winning projects run the gamut from K-12 instruction to innovative uses of quantum technologies. All six focus on addressing challenges that face the physics community.

Borunda’s camp took place this June, when 12 students lived, learned, and played together on the Oklahoma State campus in Stillwater. The camp’s lectures were complemented by hands-on activities. A morning lecture might center on “chemical bonding, formation of materials, or entanglement,” says Borunda. “Then from 10 to 11:30, they would do an activity related to that — so when they were doing the photoelectric effect, then they started making their own spectrometers.”

The immersive, residential component of the experience was key to its success, Borunda says. The students also toured other spaces important to undergraduates, like music and sports facilities. “We wanted students to get a feeling of what it's like to be a college student,” Borunda adds, a revelatory notion for some of them.

“They're playing with the equipment; they’re living in the dorm for a week,” Borunda says. “They were able to see what the grad students are doing, what some of our undergrads are doing, and they can see themselves coming to school.”

On the last day, when parents arrived, they were treated to poster presentations on the students’ research, as well as a workshop on making college affordable and attainable.

Borunda is also proud that the camp could host several Indigenous students. “Oklahoma has a high population of Native Americans, and we have so few of them going into STEM,” he says.

Cultural context plays a strong role in these students’ camp experience, he adds. Whereas the apparent contradictions of quantum science can be tricky to square through a Eurocentric scholarly lens, “people in this culture wouldn't have had a problem with this duality of things.”