Los Ingenieros, a UC Santa Barbara student-led organization, and UCSB’s California NanoSystems Institute are collaborating on a program to host local elementary and middle school students from underrepresented communities in science and technology. Visiting students will have the opportunity to work with campus technology and receive mentorship from Los Ingenieros.
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- Brian Dincau said he reached out to Los Ingenieros after receiving the grant because the organizations’ missions aligned. Michelle Cisneros / Daily Nexus
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- To help inspire the next generation of S.T.E.M. college graduates, Los Ingenieros hosts events for local K-12 students throughout the academic year. Courtesy of Andrew Yanez
Under the “Future Makers” program, these workshops will expose students from northern Santa Barbara and Ventura County to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (S.T.E.M)-related opportunities. Students will also gain hands-on experience with 3D printers, microscopes, laser cutters and more.
Founded in 1978, Los Ingenieros has a longstanding goal of forming a community amongst underrepresented UCSB students, primarily those who identify as Latine, in S.T.E.M. To help inspire the next generation of S.T.E.M. college graduates, the organization hosts events for local K-12 students throughout the academic year.
“We try to build a community for our members so they can have a place on campus that feels like home,” fourth-year computer engineering major and Los Ingenieros Community Outreach Director Andrew Yanez, who’s taken on the project on behalf of the organization, said.
Uplift Central Coast, a coalition that promotes a “diverse, inclusive economy” built by locals, awarded its $50,000 Catalyst Predevelopment Grant to California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI)’s “Future Makers” program in February. However, the program has been nearly a year in the making as Brian Dincau, CNSI’s innovation workshop manager, applied for the grant last October. Dincau said he reached out to Los Ingenieros after receiving the grant because the organizations’ missions aligned.
“I’m trying to bring in mostly students from a demographic that’s historically pretty underserved,” Dincau, who received a doctorate in mechanical engineering from UCSB in 2022, said.
Approximately 60% of students in the Santa Barbara Unified School District are Hispanic/Latino, according to U.S. News & World Report. Yanez echoed Dincau’s sentiment and emphasized that many members of Los Ingenieros can relate to visiting students.
“Some of the kids that we have … they’re non-traditional learners. A lot of [Los Ingenieros] members have kind of similar backgrounds, so we want to show them that other people like them succeeded,” Yanez said.
Overall, the program will host 30 students across nine field trips, amounting to roughly 270 visiting students throughout the academic year. Notably, “Future Makers” will host students within the Santa Maria migrant education program during a future field trip.
“For all of these students [in the migrant education program], for the most part, their parents pick fruit and vegetables. And they move from place to place,” Dincau said. “It’s hard to imagine a future outside of what your parents do. And a lot of these students, they’re fairly shy, and they have limited English skills. … Los Ingenieros are bilingual in a way that’s very helpful for some of this technical stuff … [and] are kind of key for this, for the students to sort of see themselves in Los Ingenieros.”
The first workshop will be held in November at the Research Experience & Education Facility (R.E.E.F.), UCSB’s teaching aquarium. Students will create a personalized Pokémon card with the aforementioned campus technology.
“The students will get a chance to do all that, which is really cool, because not even us students really have access to tools like these,” Yanez said.
Students will create a Pokémon card with the knowledge they gained at the REEF and the aforementioned campus technology. Courtesy of Andrew Yanez
Los Ingenieros will give visiting students a tour of the campus, which Dincau said he was initially going to omit from the field trip.
“I actually wasn’t going to include a campus tour in their field trip, because I thought that was a little basic,” Dincau said. “But the teachers were like, no, definitely show them the campus, because none of our kids tour college campuses. And that’s like, that’s the first step in thinking about college, right?”
Dincau said that undergraduate workers at CNSI have been working to develop the technology that makes printing the Pokémon cards possible, including a card recipe for the 3D printer and label templates.
“We’ve spent a lot of time developing it, but I just know that for something to be memorable for kids, it has to be really fun and cool,” Dincau said.
The R.E.E.F. trip will be a proof of concept for the program, with more workshops set to come in the coming months. The program hopes to secure additional funding in the coming months.
“If it goes well, then we can use this [workshop] to make this a more concrete thing, something that we can keep doing and have a space on campus just dedicated to this [program],” Yanez said.
A version of this article appeared on p. 5 of the Oct. 9, 2025 print edition of the Daily Nexus.
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