Indian Head, Maryland, is not a place most Charles County teenagers think much about — a peninsula on the Potomac, home to a 135-year-old Navy installation that tests explosives and propellants behind a security gate. But for a few weeks this July, dozens of Southern Maryland high schoolers spent their summer just outside that gate, soldering circuit boards, 3D-printing rover parts, and probing computer systems for weaknesses.
The occasion was RoboMasterminds and CyberLEARN, two free summer programs run out of the College of Southern Maryland’s Velocity Center in partnership with the Energetics Technology Center (ETC), a nonprofit that develops technology and workforce programs for the defense sector. The Velocity Center itself is a 13,000-square-foot facility built specifically outside Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division (NSWC IHD) so the base could hold community and workforce events without security clearances getting in the way.
That proximity is not incidental. NSWC Indian Head, the Defense Department’s largest full-spectrum energetics facility, has for years worked to build a local talent pipeline that can eventually staff its labs and those of its private contractors. Programs like RoboMasterminds and CyberLEARN are part of that broader strategy: introduce teenagers to engineering and cybersecurity work early, in the hope that some of them stay in Southern Maryland to build careers.
The engineering side of the effort put a group of 10 students to work designing an underwater rover from a basic PVC frame, adding 3D-printed attachments so the machine could navigate underwater, retrieve objects and move them to a target point. Caleb Gilroy, a rising senior at La Plata High School, was one of them. He said the two-week course pushed him past classroom theory and into problems — fluid dynamics, water resistance — that most students don’t encounter until college.
“I think this class is going to help tie textbook learning together with real-world applications, and help me make connections with people in engineering programs and professional industries,” Gilroy said. He’s already decided on a path: an engineering degree at CSM, followed by a transfer to the University of Maryland. Building the rover with classmates, he said, only confirmed the choice — “it gets you exposed to different things and can help you figure out if you like what you’re doing.”
A second cohort of 11 students in RoboMasterminds took a different route to the same skills, programming VEX robots to recognize colored blocks and sort them to specific points on a course — a more compressed, code-heavy version of the same design-build-test cycle.
CyberLEARN, the companion cybersecurity program, drew even more interest than the seats could hold: ETC received more than 160 applications from students entering grades 9 through 12 for the week-long course. Participants split their time between lectures on cybersecurity fundamentals and lab work in penetration testing — essentially, authorized attempts to find and exploit security flaws — before finishing with a capture-the-flag competition, a common format in the field where teams race to solve technical challenges for points.
The scale of interest tracks with a labor market that has been short on cybersecurity talent for years. Industry group ISC2 has put the global cybersecurity workforce gap at roughly 4.8 million people, and U.S. job postings in the field have stayed well above pre-pandemic levels even as hiring in other tech sectors has cooled.
ETC President and CEO Will Durant said the response to CyberLEARN reflects that demand meeting genuine curiosity among students. “Our goal is to help ensure they have access to those opportunities here in Southern Maryland while building a pipeline of talented future professionals,” he said.
Velocity Center Executive Director Lesley Quattlebaum, whose center is now hosting the programs for a second year, framed the value in less technical terms: exposure and confidence. “When students have the opportunity to explore, create, and solve real-world challenges, it opens the door to discover new interests and build confidence,” she said. “Classes like these are meaningful opportunities for students to see how the skills they’re building today can help shape the careers they’ll pursue tomorrow.”
The Velocity Center runs continuing education and workforce programs throughout the year beyond the two summer courses; details on upcoming sessions are posted on the center’s website.
