SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif. — When fourth grader Shungo Yoshinaga and his mom pick up a brand-new Project in a Box from their local library, he never knows what he’s going to get.
Maybe he’ll build a candy sorter, a magic eight cube or a friendly robot.
"Anything from building stuff to coding stuff," said Yoshinaga. "If I make a failure, I get so down. But this time I did not."
Since 2016, Project in a Box, a program from UC San Diego and the San Diego public library that encourage kids of all ages to get an interest in the world of STEM, that’s Science, technology, engineering, and math.
Every project comes with every piece the kids need, this week they’ll build a Bitabox. A flashing cube that will require kids to learn basic circuitry. Of course, there’s always a helpful UCSD engineering student to help them along.
Trevor Oshiro walked a handful of kids into building their box.
"It encourages people to get away from the theoretical things that we do in classes," said Oshiro. "Seeing them getting interested and excited for what we do is what keeps me going with our programs,"
So if your kid wants a hands on lesson in engineering, it’s not hard to sign up and best of all it’s free! Just become a member at pibucsd.org.
Who knows, maybe you’ll see the same spark in your child that Oshiro got when he was just kid.
WATCH RELATED: Speech and language pathologists talk about kids wearing masks in school (February 2022)