ROLLA, Mo. — Camp Winnigootchee was never like this.

A group of high school students stood at the edge of a limestone quarry last month as three air horn blasts warned that something big was about to go boom. Across the quarry, with a roar and a cloud of dust and smoke, a 50-foot-high wall of rock sloughed away with a shudder and a long crashing fall, and 20,000 tons of rock was suddenly on the ground.

The campers laughed.

“That’s cool!” said Ian Dalton, a student from Camdenton, Mo.

Austin Shoemaker, a student from Macon, Mo., concurred. “It was baad!” he said. “Do it again!”

There aren’t many wholesome explosions in the news these day, but those are what Summer Explosives Camp provides. It is just a louder, and arguably more exciting, version of the kind of summer experiences designed to recruit students to the quieter academic disciplines. The University of Iowa, for example, has a summer program in microbiology; Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., offers a one-week program in robotics; Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, offers Neuroscience Camp, which includes a trip to a cadaver laboratory to see a brain and spinal cord.

But do those programs, whatever their merits, let the participants blow things up? No, they do not. This program, which does, is set up to draw students to a program at the University of Missouri-Rolla engineering school that feeds industries like mining and demolition.