Cardboard Boat Races Today

Westmont's summer camps come to an end this afternoon, but not before the Discovery Camp’s annual cardboard boat race, which gets underway at 1 p.m. The races, held at the Westmont pool below Murchison Gym, are expected to last an hour and a half. The campers make their boats out of a refrigerator box and lots of duct tape, climb in and try to paddle across the pool and back. Most boats make it about halfway back.

ThinkCamps and Endowment for Youth Committee (EYC) offered Discovery Camp the weeks of Aug. 3 and Aug. 10. The EYC’s Brian J. Clark, a Santa Barbara native who works in UC Santa Barbara’s Experimental Cosmology Lab and Santa Barbara City College’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, led this year’s camp.

Campers made and ate liquid nitrogen ice cream, learned about the dangers of UV rays, attempted to safely drop an egg six stories and made an electromagnet for a really loud speaker. As part of the International Year of Astronomy, campers also learned how to assemble Galileo telescopes, donated by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The camp also included a trip to Raytheon Vision Systems and UCSB’s Community Science Center and Marine Science Institute.