Maine Robotics

🐾 The New Cat In Town 🐾
(Image: Allessandro Verniani for Wikipedia)

There is often so many interesting things to talk about in the STEM world as we progress every day-- but it isn't every day that a new species is found, especially for cats. Leopardis tilcayo, a tiny wild cat with beautiful spots and stripes, was originally mistaken as a housecat. Today, it is the first new cat species recognized since 1923 when the pampas cat hit the scene!
Read about the journey that began in 2017 for biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz over at National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/meet-the-first-new-cat-species-discovered-in-100-years

The reviews are in!

Each year we send a survey to those who participate in camp. We get incredibly valuble feedback from both our campers and their parents. Check out what they have to say about our 2026 season.

The 2027 camp season is soon approaching! Keep your eye on the page for updates.

Happy Birthday to Cassidy, our Administrative Specialist!

Happy birthday to our Program Director, Kendra!

STEM Fact vs Fiction: What velociraptors really looked like
(A Miniblog by Cassidy, our Administrative Specialist)

September is National Velociraptor Awareness Month (which, even though they’re my favorite dinosaur, I was completely UNaware of.) These guys are my favorite dinosaurs because of my favorite movie of all time, Jurassic Park…which…gets the look of velociraptors completely wrong. Contradictory, I know, but stick with me. The scientific facts about these fascinating dinosaurs are just as cool as the on-screen myths.

In 1923, the American Museum of Natural History sent an expedition to the Flaming Cliffs of the Gobi desert in Mongolia. Peter Kaisen, an extremely undervalued and undercredited paleontologist, came across the crushed skull and phalanges (including a very intimidating claw) of a small theropod. Thus, the velociraptor was discovered, destined to be one of the most popular dinosaurs among enthusiasts.
(You can read more about Peter Kaisen here: https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/peter-kaisen/)

The inclination to imagine this turkey-sized dinosaur as a slim-built, scaly hunting machine was natural. For a very long time, scientists and the general public alike just assumed all dinosaurs looked like big lizards. While theories about feathered dinosaurs had their place in academic and professional scientific circles, popular culture latched onto an image of velociraptors (and dinos as a whole) that were more movie monsters than scientific accuracy. In 2007, however, Alan H. Turner and his team found another velociraptor in the Gobi desert, this time with six quill k***s in the ulna (the bone that makes up the forearm.) Quill k***s like this are for secondary feathers on modern birds. Secondary feathers are the feathers that allow flight. (You can read more about this discovery here: https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/velociraptor-feather-evidence)

While discordance between scientific reality and public memory in this case is mostly harmless, it’s still a good example of STEM facts and STEM fiction battling for a place in common knowledge. This is often the case with science in media. There are public misconceptions about many things under the STEM umbrella (even subjects we teach, like robotics and computer programming) that come from TV and movies.

Pop culture is beginning to come around to the scientific facts about the aesthetics of velociraptors. Many toy companies make more accurate versions of toys based on what we know now after years of study. Books for professional and citizen scientists alike feature feathered dinosaurs. Even movies in the Jurassic franchise have added feathered aspects to many of their velociraptor designs, while keeping the “big lizard” design over-all (it is, after all, science fiction.)

I hope you’ve been made more aware of velociraptors, and this mini-blog inspires you to have fun researching them, or researching more STEM Fact vs STEM Fiction!

A warm welcome to our University-level students on the first day of the Fall 2026 semester!
Whether you're in a STEM major, following an interest, or even just fulfilling general education requirements, remember: the world of STEM has room for everyone!

"Realism is not pessimism." - Dr. Jacqueline Edmonson, President of the University of Southern Maine

When we teach our students that mistakes and mishaps are part of the engineering process, instead of reasons to give up, we hope to build the kind of resilience that will carry them through their whole life. A buggy code, or a 3D print that falls apart, or the results of an experiment not aligning with a hypothesis-- any of these situations could easily turn into disasters through a lense of pessimism. With a realistic view and academic resilience, however, they can become opportunities to open up one's mind to a host of possibilities for improvement or necessary change.

59 sessions of day camp, 3 sessions of Maine-SMART High School Research program, and 2 sessions of our Residential model for day-only campers later…
We’re at the end of the 2026 Summer Camp season! This season flew by, each moment packed with memories that will last a lifetime for both our campers and our staff.

Thank you for another incredible summer! The community that we have built over 26 years of teaching (and learning from!) Maine’s youth about all that the world of science, technology, engineering and mathematics has to offer them is a treasure that we are grateful for every single day.

We can’t wait to see what our school year programs have in store for us. Keep your eye on the page for exciting updates every season.

We're learning and we're lovin' it!

We're wrapping up the 2026 camp season with one last round of our flagship program, LEGO Robotics.

Our DIY Robotics and Electronics campers are totally locked in on building and coding their creations. Can you guess what they're making?