The Beaver Work Summer Institute (“BWSI”) is part of Beaver Works, a joint venture between MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT School of Engineering that is envisioned as an incubator for research and innovation. [Beaver Works facilitates project-based learning, a hallmark of an MIT education, and leverages the expertise and enthusiasm of MIT faculty, students, researchers, and Lincoln Laboratory staff to broaden partnerships across both institutions.

BWSI offers rigorous, world-class STEM programs for middle and high school students from across the United States. An increasing number of these programs include a fully virtual online preparation, open to students internationally, which is attended by participating schools during the school year starting February 1.

BWSI started in 2016, with a RACECAR course, where teams of students programmed small robotic cars to autonomously navigate a racetrack and has since expanded to ten courses and over two hundred students for summer 2019. In 2019, BWSI expanded this course to offer the RACECAR Mini, which is for middle school students. In 2020 BWSI expanded again to go to a virtual platform, BWSI had 178 students for this program.

The goal of BWSI is to improve engineering education world-wide by providing unparalleled technical content and support for free to participating non-profit institutions, including high schools and universities.