A team of high school students from Houston attended the Maben Lions Club meeting Tuesday to talk about the adventure of their lives: the three weeks they spent in Australia racing solar cars.
The 14 students from Houston School of Science and Technology are on the school’s Houston Solar Racing Team, which builds and races solar cars. In October, the team entered their car, “Sundancer,” in the Panasonic World Solar Challenge, a 3,200 kilometer route across the continent of Australia. “Sundancer” was one of seven cars built by American teams, which included groups from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.
The students from Houston spent a week driving “Sundancer” across the Australian outback in addition to two other weeks spent working on the car and exploring the country.
The program is headed by Keith Reese, who teaches electrical and technology classes for the Houston School District. Reese began the program in 1994. In 2000, the school’s team began racing the cars it built. It entered the Solar Car Challenge, a national cross-country race from Dallas to Minneapolis for high school students who design their own roadworthy solar-powered cars. That year, they lost.
They have not lost the Solar Car Challenge since.
The team got first place in the races held from 2001 to 2014, finishing over 270 miles ahead of the second place winner the first year they won, Reese said.
‘An integration process’
The program combines vocational training with academics, Reese said.
“Students have to understand the math, the science, the physics,” he said. “That’s how this started. It was an integration project.”
“Sundancer” has all the basic things a car needs — things like a motor, wheels, a battery — but it also has solar cells on top. It has gone up to 78 mph before, but that’s rare, Reese said. It usually travels between 38 and 48 mph, slower if there’s a lot of cloud cover.
Reese credits local businesses and the broader Houston community with supporting the program.
“It takes a huge amount of money to run this,” he said.
Team captain Allyson Taylor spoke about the trip to Australia.
When not working on or racing “Sundancer,” the students got to know native Australians; explored sights like the Sydney Opera House; ate kangaroos — which they said tasted like gamey chicken; and interacted with other racing teams from around the world.
The seven-day race
The race itself began in Darwin and moved south from the Northern Territory to South Australia. It lasted seven days, during which the students only got one real shower, though Taylor said they did stand under a few waterfalls. They drove from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., stopping at gas stations to grab quick lunches and setting up camps wherever they happened to stop at the end of the day.
The most important thing to do once stopping for the day was charge the car, Taylor said. For dinner, they used a generator to power two microwaves which heated ramen noodles, ravioli and macaroni and cheese. They set up tents, but some of them were, in Taylor’s words, “brave enough” to sleep outside.
“I slept outside one night,” she said. “And the one night I decided to sleep outside was the coldest night there.”
The weather changed dramatically once the students crossed into South Australia, Taylor said.
It was a good learning experience for the team, Taylor said. They had to manage their own money, stick together when traveling, make sure they got to bed on time.
The team’s goal was to be the first high school to make it all the way across Australia, Reese said. They did not make it, Reese said. The team completed 2,800 of the 3,200 kilometers. Still, they had the most miles of any team in their division.
“I couldn’t be more proud,” Reese said.
Many people don’t expect students from Mississippi, especially such a small community in Mississippi, to be able to enter races like this or to excel in science and engineering competitions. But Reese believes in his students.
“That’s what’s made us successful,” he said. “We don’t have the best car there. What we have is the best students.”
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