Ep 197 | Building race cars: STEM on wheels?

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you sit down and say, hey, do this math problem for me, they just don't want to do it. But if you can relate it to this and ask how can I get more out of this, you know, race car, now their minds are thinking on what can I do. So it goes back to that putting hands-on experience to learning. And I can tell you by far that our district does a great job of that. And if you put a student's hands-on something, they'll learn three times as fast.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Welcome to the Voices United in Education Podcast. Each week we showcase the teachers, administrators, and community members who go the extra mile to contribute to the success of every child in Escambia County. You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support your child's success. Students doing the bare minimum who can't wait until the last bell rings. That's the picture many people paint of high school students. But one high school has a growing team of students who are choosing to stay after school and do extra homework. Why? To participate in an electronic car racing team where students work together to build and race actual race cars. My next guest is the West Florida High School Electron Racing Team Coach, helping kids work together to build and race lithium battery-powered cars. Today he's going to share how what many would consider a distraction is actually inspiring kids to do more, turning classrooms into pit crews and STEM education with real horsepower. Chad Cherry. I am so glad that you're back and we get to talk about this because this is just so cool. Race cars helping kids do homework. It sounds like a reach, but it's real. You've seen it.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Absolutely, I've seen it. And I'm so blessed to be able to actually do it because once again, who doesn't want to do something like this? But first of all, let's just kind of describe what is Electron America, what is Electron Racing? Because most people don't know. They may think we're talking about video games or RC cars, but no, we're talking about students strapping in with a roll cage, a five-point harness, a helmet on, and all the safety gear and traveling around with a car that they built, you know, doing anywhere from 30 to 40 miles an hour.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

That is so way different than what I thought it was. Because at first I was picturing, you know, in Boy Scouts when they did the Derby, I thought they were like those wooden derby carts. And I was like, how cute. They're attaching AA batteries to them. Nope, not at all.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Not at all. So we start off with a team, and and that's this is where it, you know, it it bubbles into much more than just racing, because that's the next thing. People are like, oh, you're just racing. No, we're doing so much more than that. Students have to learn how to interact as a team. We open it up not to just my students in the energy academy or into the engineering academy. We open it up school-wide because in a regular race team, you have engineers, you have drivers, you have media specialists, you have graphic artists, you got research and development analysts, right? And so we know that not everybody's gonna have the same skill set, but if we can channel all those together, it it equates out to a winning team. So we open it up, we have roughly 25 to 30 people. We try and take it seven to eight students out of each grade level, and that gives a progression of leadership, being able to teach those underneath them. We go through and we build. We do the whole stem of the engineering of how are we going to build this aluminum chassis, right? We go through because with Electron America, what we're really the only thing that we're kind of held back on is every team has to use the same amount of energy in a battery. So if we're running lithium, it's one KW of energy. And that makes it an equal playing field. So now we have to decide which motor are we gonna run, electric motor, what gear ratio are we gonna run? So when we start to talk about that, what are we doing? We're doing Ohm's law, we're doing math. We're getting students to step out of what they think of, oh my gosh, I got to do math into something that they want to do.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Okay, so do you think they realize that? Because I love that this is open to the whole student body potentially. Sure. But when they're like, yeah, sign me up, do they realize that they will be mathing?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

No, and they don't realize that. They think, oh, we're just gonna get to drive. And it's no, you're gonna you're gonna earn the right to drive. So we we have them go through as ninth graders, as tenth graders, trying to build their knowledge up so that they can reach the goal that they want. And that that that goal is for them to learn the engineering behind it, the science behind it, the math behind it. Now, we even have students right now, they've been working on it for about six months, where they're programming a Raspberry Pi, a small little computer to take the information from the car. It processes it to display it on an LCD screen. They just got it working two days ago, so proud of them. But then they're like, can we order this? Because what they want to do is transmit from the car real-time data as the car is traveling around a track, transmit it back to us in the pits so they can analyze it while they're driving. That I don't think has been done in our sport yet.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

So it was their idea.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Oh, 100%. I don't know how to do that.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

That is so cool. I mean, because that is real life stuff. That's NASCAR, that's Formula One. That's also analytical skills that apply to lots of jobs that are in tech.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

And this is where it's also great to be able to say as a teacher, I don't know how to do that. Not everybody has the same skill sets, and you guys can teach me as much as I can teach you. And it's it's allowing students to use critical thinking skills, it's allowing students to tell somebody else they're wrong. And you know what? Try and analyze what that individual is telling them and and take it because, you know, we don't all win a trophy at the end of the day. And we want students, when they leave high school, to be able to take the soft skills, the things that we've been able to teach them and carry it into their future, into their careers. With that, they bounce ideas off of each other, we work through it, and we build. And we're always taking it one step further on what can we do better? We learned through last year, because at Five Flag Speedway, we had a, I don't know, it was about 40 cars in the field. And and when I say 40 cars, this is where we have to talk about Electron America. It's nationwide. However, our Southeast region, we had cars come all the way from San Antonio, Texas.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Really? To race here?

SPEAKER_00 7:10

To race here in Pensacola. We had cars come all the way from Miami here to race.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

So what does that do for the students? What impression is that leaving on them that they're a part of something at a location that people from these other locations are traveling to in order to compete?

SPEAKER_00 7:30

So I'm gonna say in this sport, we're obviously we all want to win. However, it's more about what can we learn from these other teams? How can we interact with them? Yes, they're a competitor. I have a local high school, Navarre, that we team up together, we work together, we share our ideas with them, and they share our ideas with us because at the end of the day, we want to beat them because we did the calculations better than them. We don't want to win because they didn't have the knowledge to do what we're doing. So we we do work together and we'll raise at five flags last year out of 40 cars, we came in second, third, and fourth. So that's big. That's it's it and and second, third, and fourth so much better in my opinion than first place because it shows that we have consistency. And we started last year saying, what can we do different? How can we better ourselves, even though we're running at the top of the field? And we knew it all boiled down to aerodynamics. So we started, and students hand-carved out of styrofoam a shell, a body. We turned around, we fiberglassed that, and then we made a reverse mold of it, just like you would a boat. Matter of fact, I traveled over to Cape Horn boats in Milton to walk through their process to understand more how to do it to bring it back to the students. And so now we have a reverse mold that the students really made by hand that we can fiberglass, we can carbon fiber, and we can turn out one after another that will all be identical. So April 4th is this year's five flags. So not too far around the corner where we're gonna once again meet with a bunch of other teams and we're gonna bring out our new car with the aerodynamics and hope that we have pushed the limit so that we end up being on top.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

So when you say the new car, are you talking about the new cool sheriff's car or another new car?

SPEAKER_00 9:39

So yes, the sheriff's car was the first one that we've produced. We are fixing to produce a second one that looks very similar, but in all carbon fiber. And it's it's great you bring that up because you know, when we talk about something like this, some people are like, wow, that cost a lot of money. Can't that money be used for a better purpose? And the answer to that is no. A lot of the funding we have comes directly from my students earning certification, industry certifications. And when they earn that industry certification, that money has to be tied back to those students. It can't be used for salaries, it can't be used for football. It's used for those students. So, in a sense, we are self-funded with what we do. Now, it sometimes does cost more for travel and other things. So we are always looking for sponsors, people that want to step in, people that want to help out. You know, we've had Northern Tools where they just donated a generator. We've had 5M Construction that wrote us a check. And the Sheriff's Department, we came on board. We have them talk to students and, you know, really making sure that all of our students have their lives, you know, headed in the right direction. But because of what they've done for us as a community partner, we wanted to give back. And so with that, we've created a it looks just like their brand new white sheriff cruisers. And when I say that, we have the red and blue flashing lights on the top of it. We have the red and blue flashing lights around the skirt of the car. I wish we could show the audience here pictures because listen, boys and girls who are listening, it is sexy.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Okay. It is just like when you see it, you're like, whoa, that is so legit. It makes you stop. And so I can just see why this has the benefit of not only engaging young people in whatever math obstacle would be in their way to create another one of these. But think about the impact it must be having on attendance.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

It's huge. When I first got to West Florida last year, you know, the buy-in to it with other students was kind of like, uh, this is this is just not that that it just doesn't look very appealing. And we've taken it to the next level, and there are students knocking the door to wanting to get in. I will have to next year when we put out applications because we make them apply just like you would for a job in the real world. I'll have to turn some students away. But the more we can get in and get them involved, the more students will move on to do other things. Now, our team has traveled all the way to Miami for a race. We did that last year. And what's so great about it is that was Formula E. We got to sit down with engineers that talk to our students, that tell them what they do on a day-to-day basis, that tell them a career path of how they could get there. And that is amazing. We actually have two former students from last year that are enrolled at UWF going through the engineering program because this is what they want to do. We have another story of another high school to where a young lady's a senior this year. She has already been in contact enough with Arrow McLaren race team that she's got an internship as soon as she finishes high school.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Did you say McLaren?

SPEAKER_00 13:13

McLaren. What? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

What?

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

That's wild.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

We're talking F1.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

This is big time.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

We're talking F1. We're talking, you know, Kyle Larson's F1 car, right? Like she's going to be able to do an internship with them. So when we talk and we tell kids, it comes so cliche ish to them that we tell them the sky's the limit. It really is, right? The only thing holding them back is themselves. So we do. We push them and push them and push them to do as much as they can because we know the potential they have.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Here's the thing. I think Pensacola, we kind of have, I'll call it a leftover belief, like a hand-me-down belief that there's no opportunities here, and how do you get from here to there? A feeling of stuckness. And this is an example of why that's not true, that the public school system is leveraging the very opposite of stuckness. I mean, that is straight to dream job land, really.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

100%. And once again, and this is even where us as adults, we're going back to the racing thing side of it, right? But I have students that are that are doing the programming and all of this, that there's no doubt in my mind they're going to go on to engineer and build robots and do things in other facets, other career paths that is stemming from this. You know, we try and keep students from being one-track minded, but we have to sometimes too and show them the opportunities that are out there.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Now, when it comes to the racing, is this wheel to wheel?

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah. So we we line up in a side-by-side fashion, just like you would watch NASCAR F1 and they wave a green flag. So I've thought for sure it'd be best time. It's a yes and a no sec kind of there. It's it's not about how fast can we go, because I truly could probably gear these vehicles to do 70 miles an hour. Problem is, is how much battery are we given? One KW of energy. So if we utilize all that up in the first 10 minutes of the race, we haven't done anything. So it becomes down to, once again, that math, that engineering aspect, the gear ratio of how do we make this battery last for one hour? Because at the end of one hour, that's when they calculate how many laps have you done. So it's longevity and performance. It is longevity and performance. And so we have to calculate like where's the sweet spot? Where do we want to be so that at the end of one hour, we have nothing left in the tank, but yet we didn't give it up 10 minutes early.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

That's incredible. So it seems like for educational crossovers, both you know, for the the students involved and for you as a teacher, what have we covered so far? Math?

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Engineering, engineering, science.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

There's some soft skills, a lot of soft skills.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Oh, there's lots of soft skills on how they interact with each other.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Yeah. So tell me about that. How do they decide on the team who is I don't know how it's divided, but in my imagination, there's a project manager, and then there's someone who's in charge of this part of the car, and then that part of the car.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

And I typically get them in the right area. I observe what they do, how they do it, and then I will assign a team lead to a car. Now make no mistake, much like when they get into the real world, they can be fired in an instant. And I have said, hey, you are not handling this the right way. We are going to put you here and we move somebody else into that position. It allows them to see how things are going to work for them one day. It allows them to always be up and doing what you're supposed to. I have students that probably will not be back with my team next year. And it's just because of maybe they're horseplaying. You know, when we talk safety and we talk about students and roll cages, like there is there's no room for horseplaying. So we we look at all of that and they have to earn it because, you know, work ethic is everything in the real world. And I believe that's something that's getting harder and harder to teach a student. So we're working through that the way that we we have these students do things, because if you just ask them, they're all gonna be the driver, right? But that's not the case. Now, I do want everybody that wants to to have that opportunity, but they're gonna have to work their way to it, showing that they've earned it, if you will, instead of it being given to them.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

And this is happening before and after school or when or during school?

SPEAKER_00 18:11

So this is this is, you know, we call it a racing team. It is kind of more considered a club inside of our district, but they come together after school. These students come after school, but they're the doors are open. If they want to come early, and I will have students that show up early, they because they want to work on this or work on that, but it's it's an after-school event. We meet on Saturdays sometimes to do some of the bigger things that we can't fit into just one hour after school. But the great thing is with teaching an energy academy, I'm able to bring all the knowledge that these guys are doing into the classroom because if you sit down and say, hey, do this math problem for me, they just don't want to do it. But if you can relate it to this and ask how can I get more out of this, you know, race car, now their minds are thinking on what can I do. So it goes back to that putting hands-on experience to learning. And I can tell you by far that our district does a great job of that. And if you put a student's hands on something, they'll learn three times as fast.

SPEAKER_01 19:23

Man, this is so cool. I hope that we see just an influx of opportunities, more opportunities for these students to stay locally. And, you know, I I'm really cheering on the F1 McLaren situation, right? That's pretty, pretty cool. Like what a pride point, right? But when I think about the future jobs that may be present in our town 10, 15 years from now, that these students will be ready for. Yes, you know, and then those companies will, I would assume, do their market research to see are we ready for these companies? Can we fill these positions in Pensacola, Florida? And hopefully, because of you and what we're doing, the answer will be yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Well, and I think we're doing that every single day. And, you know, I have to give credit where credit is due because our our our workforce education department, they are always beating the bushes and talking with employers. I'll be at a roundtable meeting in in next week, I believe it is, to where we're talking with employers and they're telling us what do they need? You know, because who better to tell us what's needed in the outside world other than the people that are employing our students? And that allows us to step back and say, okay, what can we do different to prepare these students so that when they walk out that door, they can meet the needs of other employers.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

So well said. Is there anything that you would like us to cover that we haven't covered?

SPEAKER_00 20:52

The thing for people to realize, because they haven't heard about the sport a whole lot, is that it is a nationwide thing. It is happening all across our our state, our southeast, and and the United States in general. And I don't want to go away without, you know, letting, you know, we have a couple schools here in our district that's doing this. Northview High School has joined in and they are also racing. So that high school is doing the same thing here. The PHS is got an engineering team and they have a couple cars that they are working through that they're going to be bringing in next year on the track with us. So it just shows how we can collaborate across, you know, not only our own district, but other districts and other states, not trying to focus on what I can do, but what can we teach our students and other students?

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Well said, thank you so much for joining me. I am cheering everyone on.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Yes, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share. Voices United in Education is a production of Escambia County Public Schools.