Science, Quantum Education

IBM-Illinois partnership funds quantum camp for future scientists

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September 22, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Twenty-two high school students recently completed a seven-day Quantum Discovery Camp at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an initiative designed to cultivate talent in a rapidly evolving field. Hosted by the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center in partnership with the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute, the camp combined hands-on projects with a unique curriculum; participants even engaged in a “simulated quest to save the world from a hurtling asteroid.” “We wanted to offer a weeklong residential summer camp to fully immerse students in quantum education,” said IQUIST Education and Outreach Coordinator Michael Smith, “because there’s only so much you can do in a few hours.” The program, planned for the summer of 2026, aims to build a pipeline of future quantum scientists through immersive learning experiences.

IQUIST & IIDAI Launch Quantum Discovery Camp for High School Students

The inaugural Quantum Discovery Camp hosted 22 high school students this summer, providing an immersive experience designed to cultivate future talent in quantum science and engineering. Participants engaged with hands-on projects, including soldering workshops and a simulated crisis involving a threatening asteroid, all within the facilities of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This initiative builds upon IQUIST’s three-year history of offering daytime summer camps, expanding the program’s reach and depth with support from IIDAI funding.

The camp’s curriculum extended beyond traditional classroom learning, incorporating tours of the Photon Queue startup co-founded by Illinois graduate Kelsey Ortiz and participation in Illinois’ quantum-themed escape room, LabEscape. Students also explored topics like magnetism, superconductivity, and wave dynamics through modules led by IQUIST faculty and students.

Post-camp surveys revealed a significant impact on student perceptions, with 16 of the 22 attendees ranking the University of Illinois as their top college choice. Participants actively connected with IQUIST faculty and staff on professional networking platforms, and one student even expressed interest in establishing a quantum education club at their high school.

“I think the personal connection was really felt,” Smith said, highlighting the value of direct interaction between students and researchers. This connection allowed the students to seriously consider a future in the field, with 22 students reflecting on whether they could envision themselves attending the University of Illinois.

Looking ahead, IQUIST and IIDAI plan to refine the camp’s lessons for broader implementation in Illinois high schools. “We’re fine-tuning our existing lessons to make them suitable for a regular classroom setting,” Smith said. The team intends to distribute these materials widely to teachers throughout the state. The 2027 iteration of the Quantum Discovery Camp is already planned, signaling a commitment to establishing a recurring program that fosters a pipeline of future quantum scientists.

The success of the initial camp has prompted faculty to consider how to extend their outreach efforts beyond the summer program. The camp’s curriculum featured contributions from a diverse team of Illinois Grainger Engineering faculty, including professors Paul Kwiat, Virginia Lorenz, Bryan Clark, and Eugene Colla, alongside postdoctoral researcher Jacob Beckey and graduate students Jennifer Lopez, Nathaniel Irwin, and Santiago Vargas-Daniels.

Staff members Kay Tsai, Todd Moore, and Jackie Vaiden also played key roles in the program’s execution. Participants specifically praised modules led by Beckey on quantum entanglement and a circuitry workshop facilitated by Vargas-Daniels. “We wanted to expose students to real-world applications and career pathways in both academia and industry,” Smith reiterated, underscoring the program’s comprehensive approach to quantum education.

The goal was to give participants a robust and immersive understanding of what Illinois has to offer in the field of quantum science.

Michael Smith, IQUIST Education and Outreach Coordinator
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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