High flying

Christine Carrillo

John Stupar wasn’t just any competitor at the 30th annual Engineering

Week games that began Tuesday. After all, he has years of engineering

experience and expertise on his side and even acted as a judge last

year for the same paper airplane competition he now competed in.

So, taking full advantage, or so he thought, of everything he

knows by cleverly incorporating some of the elements of the winning

airplane designs last year, the UC Irvine engineering professor felt

as if he had a leg up on the rest of his competitors.

But as the throwing of the planes commenced, he realized that the

leg up he has on his students applies more in a classroom setting

than in the competitive world of an annual event better known as

E-Week.

“E-Week is ingenuity and it goes with engineering,” said Stupar,

who was pleased to see children taking part in the competition.

“E-Week is engineering celebrated.”

Now in its 30th year, E-Week gives students, professors and anyone

else with an ingenious mind a chance to compete against one another

for a prize, for fun or, more importantly for students, bragging

rights.

“I think it brings everyone together and you get to see faculty

act like kids and kids act like adults,” said Maryam Rajab, vice

president of UCI’s Society of Women Engineers organization, which

hosted the competition.

With competitions ranging from the Rube Goldberg event -- where

students create the most elaborate and complicated contraption to do

the simplest task like put toothpaste on a toothbrush -- to the

10-story egg drop, the Engineering Student Council, which sponsors

the event, shows the community what engineering is really about.

“The first thing is learning how to make it,” 9-year-old Evan

Ehrenberg said about his paper airplane design. “Then you have to

keep practicing.”

Evan, who loves the ingenuity involved in E-Week, beat all the UCI

engineering students last year when he won the egg drop competition.

Although Evan’s attempts at winning the paper airplane competition

this year did not prove as successful, participating in the events

and competing with engineers-in-training on a university campus has

sparked the engineering bug inside him.

Looking to follow in his father’s footsteps and continue to beat

his fellow egg-drop competitors, Evan’s involvement in E-Week

represents a slice of what it’s all about.

Just as this year’s theme indicates, it’s about “Seeing the

Invisible, Achieving the Impossible.”

“It’s pretty cool, ... it shows we can have fun and do other

things besides work together in study groups,” said Vincent Wong, a

fifth-year computer engineering major. “It’s more about having fun

and we need that especially after the last couple of weeks --

midterms.”

Giving the students a chance to step back from pounding out the

classes that will get them to their engineering goal and inspire

others to follow an engineering path, E-Week brings out the

engineering spirit in everyone that attends.

“I’m proud to be an engineer because everything around us is

because of engineering,” said Stupar, who teaches engineering ethics

at UCI. “It gives me a real sense of hope for the future ... [these

students] are the seeds of tomorrow.”

* CHRISTINE CARRILLO covers education and may be reached at (949)

574-4268 or by e-mail at christine.carrillo@latimes.com.