More than 80 students from 27 high schools competed during the DuPage County ACT-SO Competition in March at the McAninch Arts Center. ACT-SO is an acronym for Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics. ACT-SO, the Olympics of the Mind, is a nation-wide program sponsored by the NAACP that encourages high academic and cultural achievement among African-American high school students.
San Diego, CA, March 26, 2007 -- Sixth-grade students from Carmel Del Mar Elementary School shrieked with unabashed amazement about 2 pm Tuesday at a UC San Diego earthquake-safety research complex eight miles east of campus. All but one of the seven-story buildings constructed by 20 teams of students in their classrooms toppled during Tuesday's quake test, with K'NEX rods, connectors, and building parts scattered across the surface of UCSD's largest shake table. The noisy learning experience was part of a unique earthquake-safety competition organized by Philip Yu, a graduate student in the Jacobs School of Engineering's structural engineering department, and involved more than 1100 fifth- and sixth-grade students from schools in Escondido and Del Mar. UCSD faculty also helped, as did scientists with the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that funded the construction of the shake facility at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center.