Customer-owned since 1895.
What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? How did it get there and what is the impact of this human-caused problem?
In small groups, students will sort and classify bags of clean trash to determine what can be recycled, composted or taken to a landfill. After learning the chemical recipe for plastics, and how plastic pollution affects our very own Santa Ana watershed, students, will use a single water bottle to engage in three art projects! Finally, students will consider multiple approaches to develop their models for a plastic-pollution solution. Students are asked to bring an empty water bottle from home. (Please make sure all water bottles are clean and have a cap!)
How does electricity turn on a light or start a hair dryer? Where does it come from and why should it be conserved?
This class breaks electricity down to an Atom and helps students find the answers to those questions. Students will engage in science and engineering practices with circuits, motors, and generators while learning how electricity works and how it gets from power plants to their homes. This class also includes a free science loan kit to be left in your classroom for two weeks so students can deepen their science explorations.
If the drought has ended, why should I be conserving water? Since we live in a desert climate, where does my drinking water come from and how does it get to me?
Students will learn the basics of the water cycle, how an aquifer works and the attributes of this vital natural resource, when they construct a model water cycle while investigating and discovering the answers to these questions.
How is wind energy transferred to electric energy? What variables determine how much energy a wind turbine can produce? What is energy transfer and how can we maximize a turbine’s energy output?
Working in small groups, students will engage in the engineering design process to design, create and test the efficiency of wind blades while answering these questions for themselves.
Check our calendar below to find available dates to reserve your visit. You can also fill out this form to make an appointment and reserve a presentation (and mobile science lab) date at any time.
View photos from our summer STEM PULL Academy for local high school students and other various educational activities.
On March 10th and 12th, we announced the essay contest winners. All 3 students were called to the office and were surprised that they won the Essay Contest! We enjoyed getting to know the students and their parents and learned about their interest in the utility industry. Each student created a unique approach to writing their essay and these 3 students far exceeded our expectations. We can’t wait to do it again next year!
It is difficult to think of an area of modern life not enhanced or in some way effected by the work of engineers. Many people travel farther, communicate better and live longer, more comfortable lives, due to engineering advancements. Yet the future holds enormous challenges for sustaining and improving life for an ever growing human population.
Among those challenges is the need to provide safe, reliable drinking water. This challenge is so important, the National Academy for Engineering has named it as one of the 14 Grand Challenges in engineering for the century ahead.
As Riverside Public Utilities strives to be a utility of the future, our engineering teams realize the challenge of providing safe, reliable, water at affordable costs. Meeting these challenges will require innovative ideas, collaboration, communication and mentoring of the next generation of RPU engineers. To that end we are sponsoring an essay contest in which high school students share their knowledge, creativity and imagination to address how they might engineer solutions to the challenge of a sustainable water supply.
The Challenge
Participants will write and submit an original essay responding to the following prompt:
Surveying the city of Riverside from Mt. Rubidoux, it can be difficult to imagine, just over a hundred years ago the city’s census recorded a population of 4,683 people in Riverside’s 39,421 square miles. Today our city’s population well exceeds 300,000, encompassing more than 80,000 square miles. This impressive growth and development can be attributed in no small part to innovative engineering projects that made land once considered, “worthless due to lack of water for irrigation”, a prime place to live, work and play.
As the city of Riverside continues to grow to a projected population of 400,000 by 2020, the need to provide citizens with clean, reliable drinking water at affordable rates will also increase. Meeting this challenge will require engineering professionals from multiple disciplines to collaborate in developing creative solutions for providing water to Riverside.
Writing Prompt
Imagine yourself as a member of Riverside Public Utilities’ water engineering team, tasked with helping to solve Riverside’s water challenges. Consider our city’s unique water supply, climate, population, environmental concerns, and write an 800-1500 word essay describing which engineering discipline (civil, chemical, industrial, etc.) you could best utilize to enhance, improve, increase Riverside’s water supply for a sustainable, healthy city.
Your essay could develop around topics such as, developing a state of the art rain water recapture system, creating a cost effective recycled water program, engineering ways to use less water, improving ground water use, improving water delivery systems/infrastructure or another innovative concept you have researched.
The contest is open to individual students in grades 9-12 as of September 2, 2019, living in or attending public or private school in Riverside (Verification required).
Submission portal has been closed. Winners will be announced on February 20th, 2020.
