Amy Hetzner:

UW-Waukesha has held individual courses and camps before, aimed at drawing younger students to its campus and feeding their imagination over the summer break. This year, however, was the first time it organized a full week of classes for students 11 to 14 to learn from the same instructors who teach young adults at the two-year campus.
It’s been an eye-opening experience for the instructors teaching the academy courses in science subjects from chemistry and ecology to astronomy and meteorology.
“The middle school is just wonderful to teach because the kids are in that part of their childhoods in which they become very, very curious about the world and are very easy to talk to about many different issues,” said Bob Birmingham, a UW-Waukesha archaeology lecturer and one of the teachers for the academy. “They ask a lot of questions. It seems to be an age where they’re putting a lot of things together.”