Two dozen teams of students from across the country have left Texas Motor Speedway for a road trip across Texas solar-powered cars. This is the 30th year for the "Solar Car Challenge."
"One of the things I discovered back in 1989 is my students weren't having the opportunity to apply what they were learning in the classroom," says Dr. Lehman Marks, who launched the Solar Car Challenge. "There was no such thing as STEM. Hands-on projects really had not developed at that time, a little bit of LEGO robotics, but not much."
Since the first challenge in 1995, Marks says 85,000 students have participated; of those, he says 97% have said the Solar Car Challenge had a "profound impact" on their lives. He says the challenge can show students the variety of jobs available in STEM fields from research, design and manufacturing to budgeting and planning a route so they would know what terrain to expect.
"One of the things we're trying to teach them is the commitment and dedication, how to work within a team, a little bit of project management," Marks says. "You're going to fail. You're going to learn how to pick yourself back up and go on. Whether these guys become engineers, whether they become statisticians, they've got a life skill that will carry them going forward."
Marks says teams working together help kids learn how to work together to solve problems, but they also learn how to make a budget and pitch themselves to corporations for fundraising.
"There are different specialties. There are people in analytics, people involved in developing the computer programs that make these cars work, there are people who just work in community outreach," he says. "One of the things we encourage each team to do is take their project and share it with elementary and middle school students. We're building dreams in the minds of the kids who see this."
On a previous drive, Marks says solar cars arrived in a town in southern Illinois.
"There must have been 1,500 youngsters there ready to see these cars come in. As the drivers were getting out of the cars, the kids swarmed them, and they were touching the drivers. I went up to one kid and asked, 'How old are you?' He said he's ten, and I asked why he wanted to touch the driver. The kid looked at me with a gleam in his eye and this little, cherub face and said, 'Because they're astronauts.' I thought to myself I got inspired during the space age. When they see these high school kids doing something really neat, it's inspiring them to get involved."
He says teams compete to design the best car, but they also work collaboratively together, saying one team might lend tools to another or make a suggestion to students working in a bay next to them.
This year, Marks says 24 teams are participating. Many are from Texas; some have come from as far away as California and Oregon on the West Coast and Florida from the east.
The team from Temple City, California, near Los Angeles, has been coming for three years.
"Our first year was the first time a public school in California to do this," one student said. "Our first year was just a bunch of tinkering, a bunch of messing up but also the most fun I've ever had. There are a bunch of processes that can go wrong, but that's part of the learning journey."
She says she hopes to go into aerospace or mechanical engineering.
"This definitely helps because it gives you a real, hands-on experience working with a team in a high-pressure situation," she says.
Kevin Ng, a teacher in Plano ISD and advisor to Plano's Green Team, says teams spend months analyzing plans and building their cars.
"My goal from the very start of the year is to train them to not need me," he says. "They're solving problems. Some people say, 'Fail fast.' That's true, but it's more nuanced than that. We want them to make their own mistakes so they can learn from them. If I make a decision and it doesn't work out, there may not be much learning there. If they make a decision and fail, hopefully they can reflect on that and get better."
Ng says the challenge also helps students learn to work together to solve problems.
"It's important for kids to learn together. They seem to like that. Even when I give them separate tasks to do, they end up working together on each individual task," he says.
Teams left Texas Motor Speedway Sunday. They stopped at the Hill County Courthouse in East Texas Sunday night and will continue a total of 632 miles this week, ending in Fort Stockton Thursday. More information about the program is available here.
