CJ Dablo:
Staff Writer
From left: 12th-graders Katherine Stringer and Rex Lee work on the boat that will represent Long Beach Polytechnic High School in the Solar Cup race on May 15 to 17. Last year, the school team tied for first place.
“The point is: it works. It floats,” ninth-grader Isabel Guzman said, as she recounted the number of times they had to tweak the motor to get it to work the first time they tested the boat. “So, well we finally got it working. Sparks flew. We flew, but it works now.”
It’s McBride’s first time participating in the 13th Annual Solar Cup, a competition that anticipates about 41 high schools and 800 students to race their sun-powered boats on Lake Skinner in Temecula from May 15 to 17. Since November, McBride students and the other high school students have thrown themselves into a project that required the students to collaborate on building, designing and finally racing the boat. The competition is sponsored by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and the teams from McBride High School and Long Beach Polytechnic High School are sponsored by the Long Beach Water Department.
It’s not the average “science project.” Students had to learn the technical skills, applying the knowledge they gleaned from design, engineering and electronics classes. They had to learn carpentry and woodworking, all building similarly shaped canoe-like boats from the wood supplied in training classes. They had to film a public-service message on water conservation and present technical reports that described their project, and analyzed and explained their project designs.
It’s the first time for the McBride High School students to participate in the 13th Annual Solar Cup. The kids who joined McBride’s team are in the Ninth and 10th grade. They learned not only engineering and electronics while they built a boat powered by the sun, but they also learned important lessons in collaboration and time management. From left to right: Nicole Pavlovich, Isabel Guzman, Eric Perez, Dezmin Hemmans, Maxwell Liu, Zoe Nearhood, Dakota Parker and Lombardo Parada.
“And [in] future years, we could build on that and make it better,” he said, adding that they’ve learned quite a bit about time management and delegation.
Fred Olmedo, a teacher of engineering and digital electronics at McBride, acknowledged that the kids worked very hard, as he thought about what he hoped the kids would learn.
“This is as close as it gets to real life, in my opinion,” Olmedo said in an interview, adding that the kids are learning to communicate with professionals. “They are really using their critical-thinking skills [and] problem-solving skills. I mean, it’s just like the whole nine yards!It’s what you would want in an engineer.”
He remembered one challenge for the McBride kids. The solar controller and the battery were ordered from China— with no instructions included. Olmedo said that while the kids found some information on the Internet, they learned how to figure out what to do.
Although the Long Beach Polytechnic High School students have been veterans of the Solar Cup racing scene, they still had challenges of their own. This time there are about 10 students from Long Beach Poly, and they have a variety of backgrounds, according to Tamara Araya, who teaches physics there.
In a phone interview, she described herself as a facilitator and mentor to the kids who chose to sign up for the full seven months, helping them to stay focused and ensuring that they met the deadlines for the various reports.
She acknowledged that the scope of the project required everyone on the team to work together to build something “so abstract,” a three-dimensional boat. She emphasized the value of collaboration on a project that is much bigger in scope than a traditional classroom project, adding that, without realizing it, the students are “doing the science and math at the same time.”
It’s a lesson that resonated with high school senior Katherine Stringer. This is the second year that she’s on the team.
Stringer is not an engineering student. She actually is thinking about becoming a doctor, and this project has inspired her to think about how to incorporate engineering with the medical field. She said that this way she could combine both of her passions.
“What’s really nice about the solar-boat competition is that it teaches you not only about how to build a boat, but it teaches you a lot about life,” Stringer said in a phone interview as she went on to explain that the kids had to learn how to budget. She also described how the students had to work together to use the materials and follow the set guidelines. Stringer even noted that the team collaborated on the boat’s vibrant hull to highlight an additional positive message beyond that of conservation.
When asked about the design of the boat, Stringer said that the students wanted to include the theme of autism awareness. They’ve painted colorful puzzle pieces on the side and plan to paint the names of people who have been touched by autism. She described the Solar Cup in less competitive terms, emphasizing instead the camaraderie with the other participating schools.
“One of the nice things!is that you learn how to get those collaborative skills to! compromise, to figure out better ways, to acknowledge that someone’s idea is better than yours,” Stringer concluded. “And those are skills that you’ll use the rest of your life, not just while building things.”
