Spaghetti, Coffee Stirs, Coffee Lids, Pipe Cleaners, and Coffee Sleeves. Why would we give these to 33 high school students who don’t know each other? These students are in Week 1 of seven weeks of the Summer High School Intensive in Next-Generation Engineering (SHINE) program, [Read more]

On Monday, June 18, Brody Bishop, an aerospace engineering enthusiast who became a pilot at twelve, and Mei Lao, who in her free time explores the links between Alzheimer’s and populations of genocide survivors, joined 31 other high school students in the biggest and most impressive cohort yet of USC Viterbi’s SHINE program.  [Read more]

Mariachi music and jazz standards enlivened the multi-school Fair last Saturday sponsored by Los Angeles Unified School District’s Local District East. Families with students attending these schools stopped at many of the Festival’s over 80 booths.  [Read more]

Did you know that some schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are built on the remnants of L.A.’s once-booming oil fields? In fact, an estimated 200+ Los Angeles schools have been built on and near oil fields, and quite a few schools are surprisingly close to the city’s active oil pumps (different sources claim there are still between and 1,071 active oil wells accounts today in L.A.) [Read more]

The teachers at the partner Elementary Schools fell in love with the robots at the recent hands-on encounter. The teachers stopped by to learn how easy it is to code a robot as part of the process of recruiting teachers to participate in USC Viterbi Adopt-a-School, Adopt-a-Teacher (USC VAST)’s new program, Building Opportunities with Teachers in Schools (BOTS).  [Read more]