He was building a model suspension bridge, along with fellow students Mark Stoops and Justin Hatton, during a College for Kids class Thursday morning at the Bloomington campus of Ivy Tech Community College.

As the students began attaching smaller strands of string to the longer ones on either side of the span, instructor Scott Sieboldt of Weddle Brothers asked them, "Why are we adding little bits of string now?"

Steven, keeping his eyes on his task and not missing a beat, replied: "So it won't be like London Bridge."

Learning how to build bridges that don't fall down represents just one of 16 classes available to 60 students, ages 11 through 14, in the past three weeks during the College for Kids program.

The summer program, which Ivy Tech conducts in partnership with the YMCA, is in its third year. John Zody, Ivy Tech director of continuing education service, said he sees "at least three major benefits" to it:

• "The kids take away something (of) practical knowledge.

• "It introduces a lot of the kids to Ivy Tech-Bloomington, and to our fine facility here (completed in 2002). Hopefully, it'll help get them thinking about higher education, either here or elsewhere.

• "They get to meet kids from all over the community. When they get to high school in a few years, maybe they'll spot another student they met at College for Kids and that will serve as the basis for a friendship at their new school."

Five students who gathered to talk while on a scheduled break from their cartooning and Web site design classes Thursday were from five different schools.

Joo-Young Roh, who just finished her sixth-grade year at Binford Elementary, said she enjoyed "creating characters" in the cartooning class taught by Tracey James.

"We copied some characters and invented some on our own," she said. "We've learned how to draw dimensions and how to do caricature. You might make a head four times larger than the body."

Sami Hayden, who will be a seventh-grader at Jackson Creek this fall, said, "We'll draw our characters from four different angles and that sort of thing."

Kaylee Hanson, a fifth- grader this fall at Highland Park, talked about how she'd linked games and other features to her newly-created Web site, dubbed "My Crazy Page."

"I didn't know anything about how to do it before taking the class," Kaylee said, "so the whole thing has been a good experience."

Ivy Tech College for Kids courses

• Bead dazzled
• Bridge design and construction
• Cartooning
• Certainly ceramics
• Chemistry concoctions
• Crime solvers
• Game development
• Great graphics
• Grossology
• Model rocketry
• Radical robots
• Teen cuisine
• Wearable art
• Web site savvy
• You're on the radio
• Zoom! Zoom! (science in motion).