COSMOS

This summer, I attended COSMOS at UCSD. COSMOS is a month-long STEM summer program where students can learn about a specific topic in a cluster. I got to meet people from all over California, all with different backgrounds, talents, and interests. Most attendees were rising juniors or seniors, and I loved learning about what their schools and experiences were like.

The cluster that I decided to participate in focused on engineering design and building kinetic sculptures. We had two major projects: building a pendulum “clock” and creating a large marble run with sensors and motors. While the pendulum clock was built individually, a major part of the marble run was working in a team. There were six teams of four members each, and every team built a marble run with unique elements and features.

For our marble run, my team decided to take inspiration from a carnival game. The marble starts in a cart, which moves back and forth between two walls. From there, the marbles can be dropped into a Plinko board when the user presses a button. Then, the marbles drop into one of three tracks, where the user has to try to catch the marbles at the end of their respective tracks. Once caught, the marbles travel back up to the beginning, where the cycle restarts.

The goal of this project was to build a fully autonomous structure, meaning that it can work without user interference. While we weren’t quite able to reach that goal (since marbles tended to bounce out of the track or get jammed), we were still very proud of what we had built in the two weeks we had to work on this project. We were each able to improve our ability to work in a team and learn what it was actually like to be an engineer.