On Summer Schools, Building Student Teams and Linking Undergraduate Education to Research

We report on summer student programmes and activities we have run, or contributed towards, for undergraduate students at Universities in the UK; in the USA; in Australia and in New Zealand over the last 16 years. We discuss the aims and objectives of such activities based around bootstrapping research projects; introducing undergraduates to the research process; and seeding new outreach and collaborative processes from research centres. Looking back, we are able to compare outcomes and different approaches in different research cultures in different national settings. We believe these activities are not so hard to initiate at any University and that they deliver some very worthwhile short-, mediumand longterm outcomes for computer science. We summarise our thoughts on such programmes and provide some advice on how to manage similar programmes.