As part of the educational experience, the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology offers students a unique opportunity to participate in a student-centered, hands-on, constructive developmental engineering program called CAMP, the Center of Excellence for Advanced Manufacturing and Production. A key part of this experience involves designing, building, testing, and competing in a variety of engineering challenges.

What makes CAMP distinctive is an integrated academic affairs/student affairs approach based on voluntary, individual contributions with students organizing themselves into teams that actively encourage participation, organization, and leadership starting in the freshman year. CAMP actively combines the classroom experience where students apply their developing technical skills in real world situations that involve fundraising, planning, deadlines, and international competitions where the teams test their mettle against engineering universities from around the world. A synergy is created where students interact in an organization helping develop their professional and technical capabilities.

The success of CAMP is based on combining both the contributions of each student with the demands of working with others. To accomplish this CAMP recognizes the importance of critical values such as trust, respect, well-being, and responsibility as essential in resolving conflicts, establishing goals, and completing a project. The unique element of CAMP is a focus on the process in that it is very clear that the means used to achieve a goal determines the outcome. Each team constructs a distinctive structure based on the dynamics of each member. By actively encouraging each student to fully contribute, CAMP teams have been able to develop a high level of intrinsic motivation where each student feels that he or she can make a constructive contribution while at the same time contributes to the success of others. The development of a winning engineering project could not be accomplished without developing the personal as well as the technical skills of each participating student.