May 1, 2025 - CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI) President Richard Yao plans to visit Santa
Paula High School on May 7 as elementary students in a special pilot pre-engineering
program showcase the remotely-operated underwater vehicles they built from scratch.
The students built their underwater vehicles under the inaugural SeaPerch STEM Outreach Program, which is the result of a partnership between CSUCI, Ventura College, Ventura County Office of Education, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division (NSWC PHD) and the Santa Paula Unified School District.
“NSWC PHD runs a dynamic K-12 engineering outreach program that delivers hands-on, engaging STEM lessons, culminating in students designing and building an underwater robot,” explained Sandra Birmingham, CSUCI project director of Project AYUDAS (Articulating Your Undergraduate Degree and Academic Success). “Our CSUCI STEM students serve as mentors in this initiative, while both providing guidance and inspiration for the K-12 students and receiving guidance and inspiration from the professional engineers in the program in what we call a ‘near peer’ mentoring model.”
The engineering pipeline project begins at Glen City Elementary School and progresses through Isbell Middle School until it reaches Santa Paula High School, where students can join an existing pre-engineering program run by NSWC PHD called the Pre-Engineering Program or PEP.
The idea, explained NSWC PHD STEM Coordinator Ramon Flores, Ph.D., is to interest kids in engineering in elementary school and keep the interest going through middle school, high school, and ideally, into a CSUCI STEM program.
“We wanted to create this pipeline, and are very purposeful in our programing, so that once these kids graduate from Glen City to Isbell, there is another program waiting for them in high school,” Flores said. “Then, after high school, CSUCI has guaranteed admission for their Mechatronics Engineering if they’ve been part of this program.”
Flores and the mentors work with the SeaPerch underwater robot kit, which includes parts, instructions, diagnostics, and other elements needed to construct the underwater vehicle. Throughout the semester Flores and the mentors create lessons in physics and engineering that are appropriate for each grade level, starting with the 5th grade with the complexity of each lesson increasing with each grade level.
“We are teaching the students science and engineering principles,” Flores said. “Like buoyancy, magnetism, electricity and physical forces. And they are really latching onto it. Our vocabulary includes things like atoms, protons and electrons.”
Mentors come from Ventura College and CSUCI. CSUCI STEM mentors are Mechatronics senior Justin Robinson and Antonio “Port” Christman, a sophomore majoring in Computer Science.
“These two are absolutely phenomenal,” Flores said. “They are very relatable to the kiddos.”
Robinson, who mentors at Isbell Middle School, sees his role as a coach with technical
knowledge in case the kids ask a question.
“Really I’m just there to motivate them,” Robinson said. “You put stuff in front of kids and they may not always want to do it, so what they want from me is really to be an adult cheerleader. But if they hit me with the spam of ‘Why? Why? Why?’ I can take it all the way down to the atom, my friend.”
The field of engineering is not well represented by Latina/os - especially women. A 2023 Latinos in Engineering and Tech Report indicated that Latina/os constituted just 9.4% of the engineering workforce with Latinas representing just 3% of U.S. engineers. So, Flores makes it a point to put a female middle school student in charge of each engineering team.
Both CSUCI and NSWC PHD are committed to increasing the number of Latina/o engineers available to fill the projected 10.9 million job openings expected in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields by 2030.
The U.S. Navy is always looking for qualified engineers, Flores said, and CSUCI graduates are being hired all the time, especially those with degrees in a STEM field. For students who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, an engineering degree can be the ticket to a rewarding career, perhaps with Navy Base Ventura County.
“If you come to me with a college degree and security clearance, there is a path to long-term employment with the largest employer in the county,” Flores said. “These are kids who could be coming from poverty to a six-figure job.”