From racing cars to getting an early look at the nursing profession, area youth are getting a chance to get a sneak peek of what a future profession could offer.

Milligan College kicked off their annual summer camps this week on campus, which includes concentrations in engineering, nursing and computer science. Over the course of the week, high school students have the chance to enhance their skills with Milligan faculty, learn new techniques in a field and meet other college students as they get a crack at their possible career.

In computer science, students were able to get an early start on working with computer systems and putting their skills to use in creating different programs and projects.

“We are using the Raspberry Pi, which is a microcomputer that is very powerful but very small, and it has the capability of Wifi, Bluetooth… you name it, it can do it,” said Milligan College’s Dr. Teresa Carter. “We wanted to give the students the concepts of how to program that Raspberry Pi. We’ve been creating our programs and placing them in the Minecraft-game program.”

During Tuesday’s afternoon session, students worked on a computer program that allowed them to go into the Minecraft world and work on different projects.

Noah Mullen and Joseph Dykes were a pair of students that praised the efforts of the program.

“We’ve been building a castle in the Minecraft program,” Dykes said. “We’re able to do different kinds of functions with the program. We’re able to do different things with the properties of the game to construct large structures. It’s been a great experience.”

This year marked Charles Kinser’s second time being part of the program. Kinser was working alongside Graydon Mull Tuesday by constructing a pair of chassis for robots that will be created later in the week.

“There isn’t a main program at Science Hill that does computer science, the closest is digital arts,” Kinser said. “I wanted to go somewhere else to get the experience of programming. This is the only camp I was able to find that gave that kind of experience.”

Over the course of the day, other camps were also taking place on campus. Nursing students were able to go through programs that involve the practice of drawing blood. Engineering students were also busy Tuesday during their camp’ which included racing karts and learning more about the college’s program.