Tennessee's STEM camp landscape splits into three clusters: university-affiliated programs at UT Knoxville, Vanderbilt, MTSU, and Tennessee Tech that run multi-week residential intensives for high schoolers; private maker-space and robotics-academy day camps in the Nashville, Knoxville, and Memphis metros that run weekly sessions all summer; and YMCA, JCC, and library-partnered single-week introductions to coding and engineering for elementary and middle-school kids.
Pricing varies sharply by format. Free public-library coding camps and after-school-aligned 4-H robotics programs cost nothing. Weekly day camps at maker spaces typically run $250 to $500. University-residential STEM intensives — TN GoVTeach, VSA Summer Academy, the UT Pre-College program — range $1,500 to $4,000 for two- to four-week residential sessions, with scholarships available at every university.
For families newer to STEM, the on-ramp is the local library or 4-H program; for kids with sustained interest, the maker-space day camps; for high-schoolers with college ambitions, the residential intensives are the credential-builder. Filter the directory below by your county to see which formats are local.