Students from our Ventura County high schools get a taste of
college in a fun-filled summer session at CSUCI.
Students earn college credits and learn engineering skills
through structured, hands-on activities such as:
- Design and build a better mousetrap
- Measure the height of the Bell Tower remotely
- Design a digital circuit to control a robotic toy car
- Distill ethanol
- Propose a new medical device.
As a highlight of the summer experience, the students typically design, build and test a bridge built from spaghetti. They test the structural properties of dry spaghetti and learn to scale their results to higher loads. In 2008 the CSUCI team was pitted against a team from UCSB, and won significantly. The winning bridge was 52 cm long with a mass of 0.236 kg, and held water bottles with a combined mass of 23 kg before breaking, as shown in the video.