July 17, 2018 — Twenty-eight students from five Ventura County high schools are learning to program robots and other engineering basics during CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI)’s four-week Mechatronics Engineering Summer Bridge Program.
The students will wrap up the program from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. on July 27 by showcasing what they’ve learned with a robotics competition in front of Aliso Hall on the CSUCI campus.
Throughout the month of July, the students get advanced robotics and mechatronics instruction on the CSUCI campus from Assistant Professor of Mechatronics Houman Dallali, Ph.D. and robotics coach Chad Gerckens from the Oxnard Union High School District.
“The objective behind the Summer Bridge program is to ensure that graduating seniors are ready to start as freshmen in CSUCI’s Mechatronics program or any of our other science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors,” said Professor of Chemistry and interim director of CSUCI's Educational Partnerships, Phil Hampton, Ph.D.
Nancy Ambriz, 16, of Port Hueneme, became interested in robotics when it was introduced in class during her junior year.
“I liked how challenging it was,” Ambriz said. “It was cool to see a robot do a task that you told it to do.”
Santiago Barajas, 17, of Oxnard loves the problem-solving aspect of mechatronics and robotics.
“It’s practical problem-solving,” Barajas said. “You can actually see it do what you asked.”
The students are studying mechatronics engineering basics with two different projects: one on robotics and the other on data collection.
“We have morning and afternoon sessions and two different cohorts of students,” Dalalli said. “They rotate between the project on data collection and another in which they study robotics.”
The robotics project will teach them to program and operate large and small robots, and the data collection project concentrates on programming a tiny device that measures acceleration, force and direction.
This is the seventh year the CSUCI Educational Partnership has been hosting the Summer Bridge Program, but a few aspects of the program have changed over the years.
The program was originally for Hueneme High School students, but this summer it expanded to include all the engineering academies in the Oxnard Union High School district, including academies at Pacifica, Hueneme, Oxnard, and Rio Mesa high schools as well as Rancho Campana High School in Camarillo.
The program used to focus primarily on physics, taught by Associate Professor of Physics Greg Wood, Ph.D., with a crowd-pleasing finale in which students would see how model bridges made from dry spaghetti would withstand a series of weights suspended from each one. A crowd of family and friends would count down as each weight was added to the tray suspended from the spaghetti bridge and the engineers of the strongest bridge would be declared the winners.
“We decided to retool the program more toward general engineering and Mechatronics,” Hampton explained. “The students will use the data collection units they have built to record data during a trip to California Adventure. They will program their units to measure acceleration and forces while they ride the attractions, then capture the data on a standard memory card. In addition, they will participate in Disney Youth Education Series Properties of Motion Physics Lab.”
The finale of the robotics project on July 27 will feature large and small robots that the students will program to navigate a maze set up outside Aliso Hall with the programmers of the most successful robot being declared the winners.
The Summer Bridge Engineering program is aligned with California State University’s Graduation Initiative 2025, a system-wide effort to increase graduation rates at all the CSU campuses. This program helps ensure that local high school seniors are prepared to start at CSUCI in the Mechatronics program or other Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) majors.